For millennia, we surpassed the other intelligent species with which we share our planet -- dolphins, porpoises, orangutans, and the like -- in almost all skills, bar swimming and tree-climbing. In recent years, though, our species has created new forms of intelligence, able to outperform us in other ways. One of the most famous of these artificial intelligences (AIs) is AlphaGo, developed by Deepmind. In just a few years, it has learned to play the 4,000-year-old strategy game, Go, beating two of the world's strongest players. Other software developed by Deepmind has learned to play classic eight-bit video games, notably Breakout, in which players must use a bat to hit a ball at a wall, knocking bricks out of it.

Elon Musk's AI firm joins forces with Microsoft to develop a'cloud brain' OpenAI will run large-scale experiments on Microsoft's Azure service Microsoft will collaborate with company on creating new tools OpenAI will run large-scale experiments on Microsoft's Azure service OpenAI will use Azure for its experiments in deep learning and AI, and Microsoft will collaborate with the company on advancing research and creating new tools and technologies. Electric vehicles safety crackdown: New rules will force... Impressive footage shows cockatoos... Watch the US Army's real-life PHASER GUN in action: Weapon... Electric vehicles safety crackdown: New rules will force... Impressive footage shows cockatoos... Watch the US Army's real-life PHASER GUN in action: Weapon... ELON MUSK'S AI FIRM: HOW DOES OPENAI WORK? DGX-1 was designed with the sole purpose of deep learning, which will help AI researchers train other systems much faster with more data. To understand the speed of this supercomputer, a conventional computer's computations take 250 hours compared to the 10 hours on the DGX-1 Man discovers wife is cheating on him following her with drone Mob storm police station and lynch suspected paedophile Victoria Fritz hides her baby bump moments before giving birth Ivanka Trump gives glimpse of her father's $100m penthouse Protestor at an anti-Trump rally at Ohio State gets slammed 100 special police agents protect suspected paedophile from mob Chili's manager snatches veteran's free meal after complaint Is this the creepy moment the corpse of a girl OPENS her eyes? Ivanka Trump gives glimpse of her father's $100m penthouse Is this the creepy moment the corpse of a girl OPENS her eyes?

OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research non-profit backed by Tesla's Elon Musk, Y Combinator's Sam Altman, a Donald Trump fan called Peter Thiel, and numerous other tech luminaries, is partnering with Microsoft to tackle the next set of challenges in the still-nascent field. OpenAI will also make Microsoft Azure its preferred cloud platform, in part because of its existing support for AI workloads with the help of Azure Batch and Azure Machine Learning, as well as Microsoft's work on its recently rebranded Cognitive Toolkit. Microsoft also offers developers access to a high-powered GPU-centric virtual machine for these kind of machine learning workloads. These N-Series machines are still in beta, but OpenAI has been an early adopter of them and Microsoft says they will become generally available in December. Amazon already offers a similar kind of GPU-focused virtual machine, though oddly enough, Google has lagged behind and -- at least for the time being -- doesn't offer this kind of machine type yet.

Harry Shum (left), Microsoft AI and research group executive vice president, and Sam Altman, co-chair of OpenAI, will be working together on artificial intelligence. Microsoft has formed a partnership with OpenAI, an Elon Musk-based company, to research artificial intelligence. The two companies will focusing on "making significant contributions to advance the field of AI" and will work on their "mutual goal of using AI to tackle some of the world's most challenging problems," Microsoft said Tuesday in a blog post. Microsoft add that it is "committed to democratizing AI and making it accessible to everyone." AI is one of the hottest trends in tech right now, fueled by powerful chips, fast networks and the massive trail of data we all leave behind us as we go about our digital days.

Microsoft's continued investment in artificial intelligence and machine learning technology is paying dividends. The company has partnered with OpenAI, a non-profit company founded earlier this year to advance the field of machine intelligence for the benefit of humanity. As part of the deal, announced Tuesday, OpenAI will use Microsoft Azure as its primary cloud provider, an important win for Microsoft as it competes with the likes of Amazon, Google, and IBM to power the next generation of intelligent applications. OpenAI is backed by the likes of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, controversial investor Peter Thiel, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and Y Combinator Partner Jessica Livingston. On top of that, Microsoft also launched a set of cloud services all aimed at furthering intelligent applications. The new Azure Bot Service makes it easier for people to spin up intelligent chat bots in Microsoft's cloud, while Azure Functions lets customers run compute functions without provisioning servers.

Microsoft Corp. struck a partnership with Elon Musk's artificial intelligence research group, OpenAI, and said the organization will use the company's Azure cloud system for most of its large-scale experiments. OpenAI has been an early customer for Microsoft's Azure N-Series Virtual Machines, a powerful cloud-computing service that relies on Nvidia Corp. graphical processing units. The two will also collaborate on ways to advance AI research and its use, Microsoft and Open AI said Tuesday in blog posts. "In the coming months we will use thousands to tens of thousands of these machines to increase both the number of experiments we run and the size of the models we train," OpenAI said in its post. Everything you need to know about what's moving markets, in your inbox daily.

On Friday during the BlizzCon 2016 opening keynote, Blizzard revealed that it teamed up with Google to provide an application programming interface (API) for DeepMind to be used in StarCraft II. This will enable artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning researchers from around the world to create intelligent "bots" to play the game. In return, the knowledge gained while playing will be used in real-world applications. "An agent that can play StarCraft will need to demonstrate effective use of memory, an ability to plan over a long time, and the capacity to adapt plans based on new information," said research scientist Oriol Vinyals of the DeepMind team. "Computers are capable of extremely fast control, but that doesn't necessarily demonstrate intelligence, so agents must interact with the game within limits of human dexterity in terms of'Actions Per Minute.'"

Google will buy London-based artificial intelligence company DeepMind. The Information reports that the acquisition price was more than $500 million, and that Facebook was also in talks to buy the startup late last year. DeepMind confirmed the acquisition to us, but couldn't disclose deal terms. The acquisition was originally confirmed by Google to Re/code. Google's hiring of DeepMind will help it compete against other major tech companies as they all try to gain business advantages by focusing on deep learning.

Tech giant Google is teaming up with gaming publisher Blizzard to improve artificial intelligence (AI) through one of its games: StarCraft. However, it seems other games may fit the "teaching" bill as well. According to Google, Blizzard announced in the annual BlizzCon that it will release tools that will allow third parties to teach AI how to play their hit game StarCraft 2. This is in collaboration with Google's DeepMind project, and the tools will be using the DeepMind platform. The DeepMind team said StarCraft is an "interesting platform" to develop current research on AI. The gameplay itself may be a useful environment to simulate the "messiness" of the real world.

Some of the smartest minds in the UK are being lured away from their research positions at Oxford and Cambridge by DeepMind -- a London-based AI lab that was acquired by Google for £400 million in 2014. More than a dozen AI researchers have left the academic powerhouses over the last couple of years for what are likely to be better-paid roles at DeepMind, according to LinkedIn. Steven Cave, the director of Cambridge University's new Centre for the Future of Intelligence, believes that the exodus of talent from academia to corporates is something of a problem. "The best people are being offered huge sums of money to go and work at these tech companies," Cave told Business Insider in Cambridge last week. "You find that you're talking to someone and they're expressing a great deal of interest in a research project and then they're snapped up. We understand that ambitious young people want to work at these big name companies and earn lots of money and that's fine. But at the same time we hope that there will be enough bright young things who are motivated by the intellectual challenge of the issues we're working on and by the sense of wanting to do something good that makes a difference for the world."