Google just paid for part of its acquisition of DeepMind in a surprising way. The internet giant is using technology from the DeepMind artificial intelligence subsidiary for big savings on the power consumed by its data centers, according to DeepMind Co-Founder Demis Hassabis. In recent months, the Alphabet Inc. unit put a DeepMind AI system in control of parts of its data centers to reduce power consumption by manipulating computer servers and related equipment like cooling systems. It uses a similar technique to DeepMind software that taught itself to play Atari video games, Hassabis said in an interview at a recent AI conference in New York. The system cut power usage in the data centers by several percentage points, "which is a huge saving in terms of cost but, also, great for the environment," he said.

Google's DeepMind has moved on from playing Go to more serious matters - attempting to solve some of the world's biggest health problems. Projects include a tie-up with London Moorfields eye hospital, which will see it using one million eye scans to train its artificial intelligence system to diagnose potential sight issues, and development of an app to help doctors spot kidney disease. Google's entry on to the healthcare scene has been welcomed by some, notably doctors who are desperate to apply some cutting-edge technology to antiquated NHS systems. But less so by privacy groups and some patients, who have been surprised and concerned that their data - in some cases not anonymised - can be shared with the tech giant. So what does Google want with our health data and should we be worried?

Elon Musk is develop artificial intelligence which will enable robots that can do housework, have conversations and play games. OpenAI's mission is to build safe AI, and ensure AI's benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible. OpenAI will measure intelligence using a metric which consists of a variety of OpenAI Gym environments with a unified action and observation space (so a single agent can run across all of them), including games, robotics, and language-based tasks. Their implementation will evolve over time, and they'll keep the community updated along the way They are working to enable a physical robot (off-the-shelf; not manufactured by OpenAI) to perform basic housework. There are existing techniques for specific tasks, but we believe that learning algorithms can eventually be made reliable enough to create a general-purpose robot.

Google plans to use more than one million anonymized eye scans to teach computers how to diagnose ocular disease. The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company has signed a deal with a British eye hospital to use artificial intelligence to learn from the medical records of 1.6 million patients in London hospitals. The goal is to teach a computer program to recognize the signs of two common types of eye disease, diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration. That's something humans are surprisingly imperfect at. Physicians diagnose these ailments by analyzing medical charts and interviewing patients, yet still get it wrong 10 to 20% of the time.

The artificial intelligence software is learning how to recognize early signs of two eye diseases.Video provided by Newsy Newslook A scan of a human eye. SAN FRANCISCO -- Google plans to use more than one million anonymized eye scans to teach computers how to diagnose ocular disease. The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company has signed a deal with a British eye hospital to use artificial intelligence to learn from the medical records of 1.6 million patients in London hospitals. The goal is to teach a computer program to recognize the signs of two common types of eye disease, diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration. That's something humans are surprisingly imperfect at.

Google DeepMind announced a partnership with Moorfields Eye Hospital National Health Service Foundation Trust that aims to determine whether or not machine learning technology can be used to analyze eye scans for earlier detection and interventions for eye degeneration. Google bought DeepMind in 2014 in a move to expand its artificial intelligence presence. The collaboration is the result of efforts by Pearse Keane, a consultant ophthalmologist at Moorfields, who contact DeepMind regarding a partnership to help conquer diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration (AMD) which combined affect more than 625,000 people in the U.K. and over 100 million individuals across the globe. The goal of the project is to create a digital tool that can read eye-scans and quickly recognize abnormalities. Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the most common cause of blindness in the U.K. "Every single day -- in the U.K. alone -- nearly 200 people lose sight from the severe, blinding form of this condition and globally the number of people with AMD is set to rise to nearly 200 million by 2020," DeepMind officials said.

Dr. Demis Hassabis is the Co-Founder and CEO of DeepMind, the world's leading General Artificial Intelligence (AI) company, which was acquired by Google in 2014 in their largest ever European acquisition. Demis will draw on his eclectic experiences as an AI researcher, neuroscientist and video games designer to discuss what is happening at the cutting edge of AI research, including the recent historic AlphaGo match, and its future potential impact on fields such as science and healthcare, and how developing AI may help us better understand the human mind.

DEEPMIND, Google's London-based artificial intelligence company, has started training neural networks to recognise the signs of eye disease in medical images. A partnership with Moorfields Eye Hospital in London has given the company access to about a million anonymised retinal scans, which DeepMind will feed into its artificial intelligence software. The project will target two of the most common eye diseases – age-related macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy. More than 100 million people around the world have these conditions. Moorfields is providing scans of the back of people's eyes, as well as more detailed scans known as optical coherence tomography (OCT). The idea is that the images will let DeepMind's neural networks learn to recognise subtle signs of degenerating eye conditions that even trained clinicians have trouble spotting.

It is a fascinating experiment that brings together Google's artificial intelligence division and one of the world's leading centres for the treatment of eye conditions. But the research project that has seen Moorfields Hospital hand over retinal scans to DeepMind has already proved controversial - and, for me, it all feels rather close to home. For the past 10 years, I have been a regular visitor to Moorfields, where I receive excellent treatment for a longstanding condition. This includes having pictures taken of the back of my eye, and it seems likely that these photos may be among those handed to DeepMind. This is for a project that aims to work out whether machine-learning technology can give doctors a better understanding of eye disease.

DeepMind is an artificial intelligence lab in London that creates what are known as general purpose self-learning algorithms. The company, acquired by Google in 2014 for a reported 400 million, is best-known for creating software "agents" that have mastered games like Go and Space Invaders but it also wants to apply its technology to healthcare. Mustafa Suleyman, DeepMind cofounder and head of DeepMind Health, gave a talk at the King's Fund in London this week where he explained how the company is working with the NHS and what kind of benefits patients can expect to see in the long run. The company operates independently of Google and creates software that can think for itself. In order to create this kind of AI software, DeepMind draws on huge data sets that can help to teach DeepMind's AI how to perform certain tasks.