Google's DeepMind AI gets a few new tricks to learn faster

When it comes to machine learning, every performance gain is worth a bit of celebration. That's particularly true for Google's DeepMind division, which has already proven itself by beating a Go world champion, mimicking human speech and cutting down their server power bills. Now, the team has unveiled new "reinforcement learning" methods to speed up how the AI platform trains itself without being directly taught. First off, DeepMind's learning agent has a better grasp of controlling pixels on the screen. Google notes it's "similar to how a baby might learn to control their hands by moving them and observing the movements."