Five of the world's largest technology companies have come together to shed light on the ongoing development of artificial intelligence. The entities involved are Facebook, Google and its DeepMind subsidiary, Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM, and the group's new nonprofit organization will grow to include a number of AI research groups and academics. Announced today, the coalition will be known as the Partnership on AI and it will be co-chaired by Microsoft Research chief Eric Horvitz and DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman. Apple is in talks with the group, but has not yet decided to join the organization. The partnership has two main focuses.

Amazon, Google, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft have announced they are forming a non-for-profit organisation to educate the public about artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, as well as alleviate anxieties around its application. The collective, which includes Google's AI subsidiary DeepMind, also plans to develop best practices on the challenges and opportunities within the field of AI. The organisation, called Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society (Partnership on AI), will address legal and ethical challenges that AI presents, encourage public discourse, and identify opportunities to use AI to bring improvements to society. The organisation does not intend to be a regulatory body, with a statement saying it does "not intend to lobby government or other policymaking bodies." Members of the Partnership on AI will conduct research, recommend best practices, and publish research under an open license in areas such as ethics, fairness, and inclusivity; transparency, privacy, and interoperability; collaboration between people and AI systems; and the trustworthiness, reliability, and robustness of the technology.

Today a new nonprofit organization called the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society announced its establishment. Participants include Amazon, Google (and Google's DeepMind), Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft. Those companies will put up money and research resources (that could mean talent, open source code, or data). Company representatives will sit on the organization's board alongside people from academia, the nonprofit world, and policy and ethics experts, according to a statement. Plans call for discussions, studies, reports, best practices, and public outreach in general.

Partnership on AI will support related research and recommend best practices in ethics, transparency and privacy when it comes to artificial intelligence studies. The project also aims to create an open platform where researchers and major players in the industry can communicate. The initiative's website explains its tenet as follows: "We believe that artificial intelligence technologies hold great promise for raising the quality of people's lives and can be leveraged to help humanity address important global challenges such as climate change, food, inequality, health, and education." All five founding companies have huge AI projects. IBM, as you know, has Watson, while Google has DeepMind, which you probably recognize as the the team behind AlphaGo.

Artificial intelligence is becoming ubiquitous. As its reach grows and is engrained into consumer products and services, elements of control and regulation are required. Silicon Valley's biggest companies are joining forces to introduce this. Facebook, Google (in the form of DeepMind), Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon have created a partnership to research and collaborate on advancing AI in a responsible way. Each member of the Partnership on AI will contribute financial and research resources.

The tech giants have joined forces to create a new AI partnership to study and formulate best practices on AI technologies, and to serve as an open platform for discussion and engagement about AI and its influences on people and society. Google's involvement in the project is mainly through its research subsidiary DeepMind, which made news recently when its AI machine beat a world-class human player in the Asian board game, 'Go'. The heavyweights lobby says, the goal is to "conduct research, recommend best practices, and publish research under an open license in areas such as ethics, fairness and inclusivity; transparency, privacy, and interoperability; collaboration between people and AI systems; and the trustworthiness, reliability and robustness of the technology".

Building Game Bot with OpenAI's Gym (Live Coding starts at 15:00) (youtube.com) I'm really loving what this guy has been doing for making deep learning and machine learning more accessible and fun.

Today a new nonprofit organization called the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society announced its establishment. Participants include Amazon, Google (and Google's DeepMind) Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft. Those companies will put up money and research resources (that could mean talent, open-source code, or data). Company representatives will sit on the organization's board alongside people from academia, the nonprofit world, and policy and ethics experts, according to a statement. Plans call for discussions, studies, reports, best practices, and public outreach in general.

The event took place on Thursday, September 22nd, 2016. We asked startup vendors and representatives from the organization team about these trends. Kevin Kelly was right when he predicted that the business plans of the next 10,000 startups were easy to forecast: »take X and add AI«. Computers that see and listen, think and predict are already making a difference across industries. Artificial intelligence can automate processes, reduce costs and improve customer experience. Corporations need to leverage those machine learning technologies or risk being replaced by'smarter disruptors.' [Tomasz Rudolf, CEO D-RAFT] For sure, we now have the technology (measured in computer power and algorithms) that is able to achieve great progress every year. But the most important difference is that AI started to finance itself. A great recent example is about using DeepMind's work on reinforcement learning to reduce Google's Data Center cooling bill by 40%. The biggest difference is unsupervised learning and the availability of "cheap" GPU power. That's why we see so many startups rising in the field of AI. I believe this is the main reason that we are entering the machine learning era.

Google's artificial intelligence unit DeepMind is getting serious about healthcare - with ambitious plans to digitise the NHS - but first it needs to convince patients to hand over their medical records. Back in February, it began work with the Royal Free to create an app to help doctors spot patients who might be at risk of developing kidney disease. The first most knew of the partnership was when it emerged some months later that it would be accessing 1.6 million patient records as part of the deal. That led to some pretty negative headlines and questions from some of the patients involved as to why they had not been informed their data was being used in this way. The app - dubbed Streams - is now under investigation by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) while the National Data Guardian, which is tasked with safeguarding health data, is also looking at it. Newly determined to forge a better relationship with the public, Google hosted its first ever patient engagement forum this week at its new headquarters in King's Cross, pledging that it wanted, in future, to work in closer partnership with the public.