Reinforcement learning woes, robot doggos, Amazon's homegrown AI chips, and more

Here's a brief roundup of some interesting news from the AI world from the past two weeks, beyond what we've already reported. TL;DR: Deep RL sucks – A Google engineer has published a long, detailed blog post explaining the current frustrations in deep reinforcement learning, and why it doesn't live up to the hype. Reinforcement learning makes good headlines. Teaching agents to play games like Go well enough to beat human experts like Ke Jie fuels the man versus machine narrative. But a closer look at deep reinforcement learning, a method of machine learning used to train computers to complete a specific task, shows the practice is riddled with problems.