Skip to main content current edition: International edition The Guardian - Back to home Become a supporter Subscribe Find a job Jobs Sign in Search Show More Close with google sign in become a supporter subscribe search find a job dating more from the guardian: change edition: edition International edition The Guardian - Back to home browse all sections close Artificial intelligence (AI) The Observer Artificial intelligence brings its brains and money to London Following two big acquisitions by US tech companies of AI startups based in academia, the capital is emerging as a hub for young scientist-entrepreneurs Alicia Vikander in Ex Machina portrayals of he sometimes slow and laborious work of AI research. Photograph: Film4/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar Artificial intelligence (AI) The Observer Artificial intelligence brings its brains and money to London Following two big acquisitions by US tech companies of AI startups based in academia, the capital is emerging as a hub for young scientist-entrepreneurs Rob Davies @ByRobDavies Sat 5 Mar ‘16 16. 05 GMT Last modified on Sat 2 Dec ‘17 04. -- With time though, experience helps it decide which manoeuvres will allow it to evade the clutches of a relentless gang of animated ghosts. This is just one of dozens of artificial intelligence (AI) projects slowly transforming the UK into the global hub for a technology that elicits fascination and fear in equal measure. The point of teaching a computer to master Pac-Man is to help it “think” and learn like a human. -- Murray Shanahan, professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial, believes that while we should be thinking hard about the moral and ethical ramifications of AI, computers are still decades away from developing the sort of abilities they’d need to enslave or eliminate humankind and bringing Hawking’s worst fears to reality. One reason for this is that while early artificial intelligence systems can learn, they do so only falteringly. For instance, a human who picks up one bottle of water will have a good idea of how to pick up others of different shapes and sizes. -- But it’s hard to escape the feeling – in the wake of DeepMind and SwiftKey – that they if they want to, the door is open. CASE STUDIES One reason corporate behemoths are willing to spend so much money on artificial intelligence is that the global talent pool is still relatively limited. London has proved a particularly good hunting ground for Silicon Valley stalwarts ready to spend big on the most promising AI inventions and, most importantly, on the people who came up with them. DEEPMIND When Google spent £400m on machine-learning startup DeepMind, it was a ringing endorsement of the wealth of talent in London’s artificial intelligence scene. The firm was founded in 2010 by chess prodigy and neuroscientist Demis Hassabis with University College London colleague Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman. They are said to have turned down an offer from Facebook before agreeing to the Google deal, which was reportedly overseen personally by the company’s then chief executive, Larry Page. For Google, the deal was as much about acquiring the most talented brains in artificial intelligence as getting its hands on DeepMind’s technology. DeepMind is about reinforcement learning, or teaching computers to learn skills at the speed a human can. -- Microsoft wanted to integrate that technology with its own Word Flow keyboard app, and was prepared to pay top dollar for the privilege. SwiftKey is more than just an alternative keyboard: it uses high-quality predictive text, based on artificial intelligence, to suggest the word a user will type next, having analysed their writing style. The keyboard supports more than 100 languages and has been used by astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, for whom the company built a special tool to assist him in giving lectures. AI ON THE BIG SCREEN According to researchers at Imperial College, one of the most realistic cinema portrayals of artificial intelligence is the 2015 film Ex Machina, written and directed by Alex Garland. The film charts the efforts of a young programmer to assess the abilities of a humanoid AI system built by an eccentric scientist.