Demis Hassabis has a modest demeanour and an unassuming countenance, but he is deadly serious when he tells me he is on a mission to "solve intelligence, and then use that to solve everything else". Coming from almost anyone else, the statement would be laughable; from him, not so much. Hassabis is the 39-year-old former chess master and video-games designer whose artificial intelligence research start-up, DeepMind, was bought by Google in 2014 for a reported 625 million. He is the son of immigrants, attended a state comprehensive in Finchley and holds degrees from Cambridge and UCL in computer science and cognitive neuroscience. A "visionary" manager, according to those who work with him, Hassabis also reckons he has found a way to "make science research efficient" and says he is leading an "Apollo programme for the 21st century". He's the sort of normal-looking bloke you wouldn't look twice at on the street, but Tim Berners-Lee once described him to me as one of the smartest human beings on the planet. Artificial intelligence is already all around us, of course, every time we interrogate Siri or get a recommendation on Android. And in the short term, Google products will surely benefit from Hassabis's research, even if improvements in personalisation, search, YouTube, and speech and facial recognition are not presented as "AI" as such. "It's just stuff that works.") In the longer term, though, the technology he is developing is about more than emotional robots and smarter phones.

For artificial intelligence, 2016 has been called "like 2015 on steroids." Want to learn more about what that really means? Follow these 10 twitter users for an insider's take on the latest developments in AI. The brains behind Google's AI platform DeepMind, Hassabis is arguably one of the most important voices in the AI world today. AlphaGo, created by DeepMind, has surpassed expectations, winning in the game of Go ten years before experts predicted.

Microsoft is the world's most valuable company, with a 261 billion market cap. And an IBM computer named Deep Blue defeats Garry Kasparov, reigning world chess champion and, at the time, the highest-ranked chess player to have ever lived. Though it was not the first time man has lost to machine, it is perhaps the most prominent, highly publicized by IBM and widely covered by the global media. It was viewed as a milestone for AI, the true arrival of computer intelligence. The world celebrated the achievement of technology -- or offered doomsday predictions of a robot revolution.

Elon Musk has not been shy about his concerns over artificial intelligence turning evil. So it wasn't a surprise in December when Musk announced the formation of OpenAI, an open-source, non-profit focused on advancing "digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole." That's all well and good, but not much has been revealed about what exactly OpenAI is working on. OpenAI's co-founder and CTO Greg Brockman told Tech Insider that OpenAI is primarily focusing on advancing machine learning, which is the technology that enables computers to learn how to complete tasks through experience. Specifically, the company is focusing on two key types of machine learning that every major tech company is investing in right now.

Elon Musk has not been shy about his concerns over artificial intelligence turning evil. So it wasn't a surprise in December when Musk announced the formation of OpenAI, an open-source, non-profit focused on advancing "digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole." That's all well and good, but not much has been revealed about what exactly OpenAI is working on. OpenAI's co-founder and CTO told Tech Insider that OpenAI is primarily focusing on advancing machine learning, which is the technology that enables computers to learn how to complete tasks through experience. Specifically, the company is focusing on two key types of machine learning that every major tech company is investing in right now.

Google DeepMind, the search giant's artificial intelligence company in London, has officially announced its first big push into medical technology. The research-intensive startup launched a new division called DeepMind Health and acquired a university spinout company with a healthcare app called Hark. It has also built an app with the NHS called "Streams." DeepMind Health, announced on the DeepMind website on Wednesday, will be led by Mustafa Suleyman, cofounder and head of applied AI at Google DeepMind. He will oversee a team of approximately 15 people, according to Bloomberg, aiming to develop digital tools that improve patient care.

I like it because its almost as if this game was designed to be perfect for thumbstick controllers. You have highly precise control over the "character". You have 1 life and die if you touch the blue diamonds, or the orange parts of the "gates" (the white and orange barbell shaped things). You get points by killing the blue things. You can't touch the blue things, but if you hit the long white "bar" of the barbell shape, it explodes and kills blue things, and each blue thing gives off 3 green diamond "multipliers" which accumulate and multiply your points.

DeepMind was a relatively unknown artificial intelligence (AI) startup in London up until 2014, when it was bought by Google for around 400 million. Today some of the smartest people in the world are queuing up to work at DeepMind, according to an article by Celemency Burton-Hill in The Guardian in February. Interestingly, the same article states that no one has ever left DeepMind, which has created a series of algorithms that can learn for themselves and beat the best humans at games like Go and "Space Invaders." Based in up-and-coming King's Cross, DeepMind now employs around 250 people. However, as Burton-Hill points out, getting a job there is far from easy.

Demis Hassabis, the cofounder and CEO of DeepMind, a Google-owned AI lab in London, is planning to buy a Tesla 3 from Elon Musk -- one of the company's earliest investors. Hassabis congratulated Musk on Twitter after Musk tweeted that 276,000 Model 3 orders had been made by the end of Saturday, just two days after the electric car was launched. He also said he was planning to buy one of the new vehicles. "Really amazing to hear!! Just placing my order...," Hassabis wrote. At 35,000 ( 24,423), the five-seater Model 3 is the cheapest Tesla to date and is due to start shipping in late 2017.

I am trying my own implementation of the DQN paper by Deepmind in tensor flow and am running into difficulty with clipping of the loss function. We also found it helpful to clip the error term from the update to be between 1 and 1. Because the absolute value loss function x has a derivative of 1 for all negative values of x and a derivative of 1 for all positive values of x, clipping the squared error to be between 1 and 1 corresponds to using an absolute value loss function for errors outside of the ( 1,1) interval. This form of error clipping further improved the stability of the algorithm. What I have tried so far is using tf.clip_by_value to clip the loss I calculate between -1 and 1.