Why Google's DeepMind next-gen machine learning will stay undercover

Google's DeepMind, a London-based artificial intelligence company the search-and-cloud giant acquired in 2014, has been closely associated with Google's quest to build general AI. Earlier this year, with little publicity, DeepMind unveiled what looks like a useful step in that direction. The DeepMind team released a paper describing a neural network approach that would allow automatic "transfer learning," meaning a neural network could reuse what it already "knows" on new problems. If history is any hint, this is one innovation Google will keep close to its chest. Neural networks are a common type of machine learning that mimic, perhaps distantly, how neurons interrelate in the brain to pass information around.