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."

Lip reading, an essential tool that helps the hearing-impaired to better understand the world, is now conducted by artificial intelligence with a better accuracy than done by humans, University of Oxford reveals. In an article currently published by Quartz we learn that a new paper issued by the University of Oxford with funding from Alphabet's Deepmind, reveals that they have developed an artificial intelligence system called LipNet that can read lips with an accuracy of 93.4%. University of Oxford has previously released a system that operated word-by-word with an accuracy of 79.9%, but their new system has now developed a new and different way of approaching the problem. "Instead of teaching the AI each mouth movement using a system of visual phonemes, they built it to process whole at a time. That allowed the AI to teach itself what letter corresponds to each slight mouth movement", Quartz writes. The new system was exposed to 29 000 3-second-videos videos labelled with the correct text to train the system, and in comparison with human lip-readers that had an average error rate of 47.7%, the AI's error rate was only 6.6%.

Artificial intelligence (AI) in games is often confused with programmed bots (or NPCs). Yes, these bots are "intelligent," so to speak, because they interact with human players, but those interactions are limited by the bots' programming -- they don't behave outside their coding. Conversely, AI applications in games can react to the behavior of human players with their own assessment of the situation -- like in that historic game of Go -- using an algorithm called deep learning. At BlizzCon 2016 on Friday, Google and Blizzard Entertainment announced a partnership to bring Google's deep-learning AI, DeepMind, to StarCraft II. DeepMind will use the real-time strategy game as a testing environment for AI research, using deep reinforcement learning to develop an AI agent that can play StarCraft II effectively.

Google cut power usage in its data centers by several percentage points earlier this year by trusting artificially intelligent software derived from 1980s-era Atari video games. And in the years to come, the Internet giant not only could save much more electricity, but also solve far larger problems by taking on a much more complex video game. Research scientists at Google's DeepMind unit announced Friday they are developing a computer program that reads data about Blizzard Entertainment's "StarCraft II" games and learns how to play on its own. The software would have to figure out how to split its attention between micromanagement and long-term strategic decisions. It's that maneuvering that could deliver big breakthroughs.

Today on In Case You Missed It: MIT's Computer Science and AI Lab have cooked up another autonomously driving vehicle, but this one is a disability scooter. In this newly posted video, you can watch as the scooter navigates around human obstacles when taking a person on the way to their destination. In other AI news, Google and Blizzard Entertainment are teaming up to use Deepmind to train the system to autonomously play Starcraft II. If you, too, have a fondness for Big Mouth Billy Bass, the singing fish trophy, you need to see how one was hacked to be the voice of Alexa. And if you haven't yet played the New York Times' Voter Suppression Trail, you're missing out on both nostalgia and maybe sadness.

The researchers, working with Google's artificial intelligence division DeepMind, trained the software on more than 30,000 videos of test subjects speaking sentences. Over time, it would match certain words with particular lip movements to learn what words were being spoken. The researchers then played it further videos of people speaking sentences and the LipNet software succeeded with 93.4 per cent accuracy. This compares to 52.3 per cent for hearing impaired students, and surpassed other lip-reading programs. Unlike previous software, LipNet digested the phrases as full sentences, and allowing it to put words in context rather than decipher them individually allowed much greater accuracy.

Even professional lip-readers can figure out only 20% to 60% of what a person is saying. Slight movements of a person's lips at the speed of natural speech are immensely difficult to reliably understand, especially from a distance or if the lips are obscured. And lip-reading isn't just a plot point in NCIS: It's an essential tool to understand the world for the hearing-impaired, and if automated reliably, could help millions. A new paper (pdf) from the University of Oxford (with funding from Alphabet's DeepMind) details an artificial intelligence system, called LipNet, that watches video of a person speaking and matches text to the movement of their mouth with 93.4% accuracy. The previous state of the art system operated word-by-word, and had an accuracy of 79.6%.

DeepMind will not build an unstoppable AI on its own. Instead, both companies will release a series of programming tools on early 2017 that will allow researchers and hobbyist around the world build and train their bots to play Starcraft II. Google's DeepMind researcher Orion Vinyals made the announcement during BlizzCon 2016 at Anaheim, California. Vinyals was the top-ranked SC2 player in Spain's leaderboards before becoming a top scientist in the British AI startup. Vinyals believes the results of the investigation could translate to the real life.