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."

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.