Mark Zuckerberg notified Meta staff today to introduce them to the new superintelligence team. The memo, which WIRED obtained, lists names and bios for the recently hired employees, many of whom came from rival AI firms like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Over the past few months, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been on a recruiting frenzy to poach some of the most sought after talent in AI. The social media giant has invested 14.3 billion in Scale AI and hired Alexandr Wang, its CEO, to run Meta's Superintelligence Labs (MSL). News of the memo was first reported by Bloomberg.

By using the latest advances in AI, the new Microsoft lab will look to better understand the nitty-gritty details of molecular properties and behaviours. Microsoft Research is opening a lab in Amsterdam focused on advancing molecular simulation by using machine learning, quantum chemistry and quantum computing. The lab will be led by Dr Max Welling, who specialises in computer science and machine learning. Welling is currently based at the University of Amsterdam and will be joining Microsoft Research in September. He was hosted on the Microsoft Research podcast this week by Chris Bishop, a lab director of Microsoft Research in Europe, where the announcement was made.

BlackBerry has set up a business unit focused on cybersecurity research and development. The company said its BlackBerry Labs unit will include a team of over 120 software developers, architects, researchers, product leads and security experts. BlackBerry said the new lab will have a focus on data science and machine learning and aims to "investigate, incubate and facilitate" technologies for security and data privacy for its customers. Initial projects from BlackBerry Labs will focus on machine-learning approaches to security for BlackBerry's Cylance, enterprise and QNX business units. While BlackBerry is still best known as an early smartphone pioneer, it no longer makes devices (these are made under licence by TCL Communication), and now focuses on security software for smartphones and the internet of things, embedded systems and autonomous cars.

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., the Korean-based electronics giant, will open a new artificial-intelligence center in Cambridge, England, as the company seeks to benefit from cutting-edge academic research into the technology. Andrew Blake, a pioneering researcher in the development of systems that enable computers to interpret visual data, and a former director of Microsoft Corp.'s Cambridge Research Lab, will head the new Samsung AI center, the company said Tuesday. The center may hire as many as 150 AI experts, bringing the total number of people Samsung has working on research and development in the U.K. to 400 "in the near future," the company said. U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May said Samsung's new lab would create high-paying, high-skilled jobs. "It is a vote of confidence in the U.K. as a world leader in artificial-intelligence," she said. Samsung said it selected Cambridge because the University of Cambridge is world-renowned for its work on machine-learning and because the city already had a number of other prominent AI research labs, including Microsoft's.

DeepMind Technologies Inc., the machine learning company owned by Alphabet Inc., announced today that it's opening a new artificial intelligence lab in Paris. The new lab will be headed by Remi Munos (pictured), a French native and senior researcher at DeepMind who has authored 150 research papers. In an announcement video, Munos said Paris is a perfect fit for DeepMind's next lab because the city has a thriving AI and machine learning ecosystem that's still growing. "Effectively, there are a large number of research labs in universities, engineering schools and public research centers together with a large number of AI startups who have appeared, as well as large companies that are setting themselves up," said Munos. "Joining this network is a very positive move for DeepMind, to collaborate with this scientific community in order to contribute to research and also to teach students." Frédérique Vidal, France's Minister of Higher Education, Research and Innovation, said in a statement that DeepMind's Paris lab "demonstrates the excellence and attractiveness of the Artificial Intelligence Ecosystem in France," and she added that the country will soon establish partnerships with "the public actors of French research."

The first genuinely impressive AI assistant may well have a Canadian accent. Facebook announced today that it is tapping into Canada's impressive supply of artificial-intelligence talent and expertise by creating a major AI research center in Montreal. Several big recent advances in AI can be traced back to Canadian research labs, and Facebook is hoping that the new lab may help it take advantage of whatever comes next. The new center will focus, in particular, on an area of AI known as reinforcement learning (see "10 Breakthrough Technologies 2017: Reinforcement Learning"). The center will seek to apply this and other novel approaches to language, with the aim of producing more coherent and useful virtual assistants, says Yann LeCun, director of AI research at Facebook.

Microsoft Corp. is setting up a new research lab focused on artificial intelligence with the goal of creating more general-purpose learning systems. The new lab, called Microsoft Research AI, will be based at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, and involve more than 100 scientists from across various sub-fields of artificial intelligence research, including perception, learning, reasoning and natural language processing. The goal, said Eric Horvitz, the director of Microsoft Research Labs, is to combine these disciplines to work toward more general artificial intelligence, meaning a single system that can tackle a wide-range of tasks and problems. Such a system, for instance, might be able to both plan the best route to drive through a city and also figure out how to minimize your income tax bill, while also understanding difficult human concepts like sarcasm or gestures. This differs from so-called narrow AIs, which are just designed to perform a single task well -- for instance, recognize faces in digital photographs.

Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) is pushing further into the artificial intelligence market, announcing a new lab dubbed Microsoft Research AI, which is aimed at developing more general-purpose learning systems. The lab, which will be located at its Redmond, Wash., headquarters will house more than 100 scientists from all areas of AI: learning, natural language, perception and reasoning. The idea behind the lab is multifaceted, with one goal being the creation of AI-enabled systems that can handle a variety of problems or tasks rather than a single product or device to tackle a particular problem, like getting around in traffic. Microsoft said the integrated approach lets it develop tools that can do complex, multifaceted tasks. "Every day, computers are getting better at doing individual tasks like recognizing faces in photos or words in a conversation, using functionality such as pattern recognition and classification," said Harry Shum, executive vice president of Microsoft AI and Research Group, in a blog post.

Microsoft Corp. is setting up a new research lab focused on artificial intelligence with the goal of creating more general-purpose learning systems. The new lab, called Microsoft Research AI, will be based at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, and involve more than 100 scientists from across various sub-fields of artificial intelligence research, including perception, learning, reasoning and natural language processing. The goal, said Eric Horvitz, the director of Microsoft Research Labs, is to combine these disciplines to work toward more general artificial intelligence, meaning a single system that can tackle a wide-range of tasks and problems. Such a system, for instance, might be able to both plan the best route to drive through a city and also figure out how to minimize your income tax bill, while also understanding difficult human concepts like sarcasm or gestures. This differs from so-called narrow AIs, which are just designed to perform a single task well -- for instance, recognize faces in digital photographs.

If you use your credit card to buy a latte in Vancouver and a couple of minutes later that card is making a purchase in Singapore, that's a red flag for fraud. But increasingly sophisticated fraud calls for more sophisticated measures to deal with it, and that is among the challenges behind RBC Research's announcement today that it is launching a new lab to explore the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in the financial sector. Richard Sutton, a computer scientist and pioneer in artificial intelligence, has been named head academic advisor to RBC Research in machine learning. The new lab will work with the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute at the University of Alberta, where Sutton is a professor. Foteini Agrafioti, head of RBC Research, which was launched last fall in Toronto, said the announcement will help her organization to play a major role in advancing AI research in the future of banking. Agrafioti said that as the complexity of fraud evolves over time, it becomes increasingly difficult to detect it.