Inside Google DeepMind's Latest Attempts to Achieve a General Artificial Intelligence

General artificial intelligence, a machine that is capable of human-level expertise in multiple tasks, was the hot topic during the morning of the Rework Deep Learning Summit in London yesterday, with two of the UK's best AI companies Google DeepMind and Swifkey weighing in on the advances being made, and how far we are from a truly human AI. In his seminal piece about DeepMind for Wired magazine in June 2015, David Rowan wrote: "[DeepMind] showed that their artificial agent had learned to play 49 Atari 2600 video games when given only minimal background information. The deep Q-network had mastered everything from a martial-arts game to boxing and 3D car-racing games, often outscoring a professional (human) games tester." What this obfuscated was that the deep neural network was learning how to master each game one at a time. The same neural network couldn't, for example, flick between two different games and maintain its skill like a human would.