On December 2nd, 1942, a team of scientists led by Enrico Fermi came back from lunch and watched as humanity created the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction inside a pile of bricks and wood underneath a football field at the University of Chicago. Known to history as Chicago Pile-1, it was celebrated in silence with a single bottle of Chianti, for those who were there understood exactly what it meant for humankind, without any need for words. Now, something new has occurred that, again...

As you probably already know, DeepMind’s A.I. named AlphaGo is now winning 3–1 against the top Go player of the last decade, Lee Sedol (update: the final result was 4–1). This is considered a great A.I. achievement because there are more legal Go positions than atoms in the universe. Therefore, a machine is not capable of computing all possible plays and pick the best one, but it has to develop some sort of intuition...

Go isn’t just a game—it’s a living, breathing culture of players, analysts, fans, and legends. Over the last 10 days in Seoul, South Korea, we’ve been lucky enough to witness some of that incredible excitement firsthand. We've also had the chance to see something that's never happened before: DeepMind's AlphaGo took on and defeated legendary Go player, Lee Sedol (9-dan professional with 18 world titles), marking a major milestone for artificial intelligence.

Google's artificial intelligence made a surprise move in the recent Go challenge that has some people worried about what happens when AI makes a non-human decision that we could not anticipate.

Artificial intelligence is poised to automate lots of service jobs. The White House has estimated there's an 83% chance that someone making less than $20 a hour will eventually lose their job to a computer. That means gigs like customer-service rep could soon be extinct. But it's not just low-paying positions that will get replaced. AI also could cause high-earning (like top 5% of American salaries) jobs to disappear. Fast.

Scrambling to respond to the success of Google DeepMind’s world-beating Go program AlphaGo, South Korea announced on 17 March that it would invest $863 million (1 trillion won) in artificial-intelligence (AI) research over the next five years. It is not immediately clear whether the cash represents new funding, or had been previously allocated to AI efforts. But it does include the founding of a high-profile, public–private research...

Artificial intelligence is breathing down our necks: Software built by Google startled the field last week by easily defeating the world’s best player of the Asian board game Go in a five-game match. Go resembles chess in the deep, complex problems it poses but is even harder to play and has resisted AI researchers longer. It requires mastery of strategy and tactics while you conceal your own plans and try to read your opponent’s.

Deep Blue's recent trouncing of Garry Kasparov sent shock waves through the Western world. In much of the Orient, however, the news that a computer had beaten a chess champion was likely to have been met with a yawn. While there are avid chess players in Japan, China, Korea and throughout the East, far more popular is the deceptively simple game of Go, in which black and white pieces called stones are used to form intricate, interlocking patterns that sprawl across the board.

Welcome! This is the first chapter of a five-part series about machine learning. Machine learning is a very hot topic for many key reasons, and because it provides the ability to automatically obtain deep insights, recognize unknown patterns, and create high performing predictive models from data, all without requiring explicit programming instructions.

AlphaGo recently played against 9-dan professional Go player Lee Sedol. The AI won the first three games against the human opponent, achieving victory in the best-of-five tournament. With this challenge accomplished, the DeepMind team is looking for new problems to use as a testbed for the system. Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind, expressed interest in StarCraft as a challenge.

A novel written largely by an artificial intelligence passed the first round of screening for a national literary prize in Japan.

A team from China plans to challenge Google’s AlphaGo, the artificial intelligence (AI) program that beat a world-class player in the ancient board game Go, the state-owned Shanghai Securities News reported on Thursday. Scientists from the China Computer Go team will issue a challenge to AlphaGo by the end of 2016, said attendees at an event in Beijing organized by the Chinese Go Association and the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence...

The Go-playing program teaches itself to replicate something very much like human intuition, an advance that promises far-reaching consequences. By Michael Nielsen.

Microsoft software engineer Saqib Shaikh was promoted at the company's Build 2016 developer conference. Shaikh, who is blind, created a research project called Seeing AI, which uses intelligence APIs from Microsoft Cognitive Services. The app gives him accurate descriptions of people, places and actions in the world

As Silicon Valley fights for talent, universities struggle to hold on to their stars. That a computer program can repeatedly beat the world champion at Go, a complex board game, is a coup for the fast-moving field of artificial intelligence (AI). Another high-stakes game, however, is taking place behind the scenes, as firms compete to hire the smartest AI experts. Technology giants, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Baidu, are racing to expand their AI activities.

Ever since Tay was introduced to twitter, and how her equivalent Xiaoice did not meet the same type of reaction in China, there has been a lot of hyperbole from "just a simple chatbot" to "martyred for our sins". This is a bit of my own personal digging around in my off time on the matter, a collation of links, papers on just what Microsoft, and Bing by extension, has been working on in the past few years in the realm of deep learning.

Nvidia chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang announced that the company has created a new chip, the Tesla P100, with 15 billion transistors for deep-learning computing. It’s the biggest chip ever made, Huang said. Huang made the announcement during his keynote at the GPUTech conference in San Jose, California. He unveiled the chip after he said that deep-learning artificial intelligence chips have already become the company’s fastest-growing business.

A team of technologists working with Microsoft and others produce a 3D-printed painting in the style of Dutch master Rembrandt.

The Microns project aims to decipher the brain’s algorithms in an effort to revolutionize machine learning. By Emily Singer.

In 1950, the brilliant mathematician and cryptographer Alan Turing began his seminal paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” with a simple query: “I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’ ” It is a question that still resonates today, because it is essentially incoherent and thus unanswerable. Turing himself quickly turned to a more pragmatic approach, proposing the now famous Turing test. While there are many versions today, they all essentially involve a human...