What Google’s AI-designed chip tells us about the nature of intelligence

This article is part of our reviews of AI research papers, a series of posts that explore the latest findings in artificial intelligence. In a paper published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature last week, scientists at Google Brain introduced a deep reinforcement learning technique for floorplanning, the process of arranging the placement of different components of computer chips. The researchers managed to use the reinforcement learning technique to design the next generation of Te