From Games to Assembly Lines, Robots Learn Faster Than Ever

A new artificial intelligence startup called Osaro aims to give industrial robots the same turbocharge that DeepMind Technologies gave Atari-playing computer programs. In December 2013, DeepMind showcased a type of artificial intelligence that had mastered seven Atari 2600 games from scratch in a matter of hours, and could outperform some of the best human players. Google swiftly snapped up the London-based company, and the deep-reinforcement learning technology behind it, for a reported $400 million. Now Osaro, with $3.3 million in investments from the likes of Peter Thiel and Jerry Yang, claims to have taken deep-reinforcement learning to the next level, delivering the same superhuman AI performance but over 100 times as fast. Deep-reinforcement learning arose from deep learning, a method of using multiple layers of neural networks to efficiently process and organize mountains of raw data (see "10 Breakthrough Technologies 2013: Deep Learning").