Google DeepMind: The Podcast

Can artificial intelligence solve one of science’s most chaotic physics puzzles? In this episode, Professor Hannah Fry sits down with Peter Battaglia, Senior Director of Research at Google DeepMind, to explore how machine learning is transforming global weather forecasting. From providing critical early warnings for Category 5 storms like Hurricane Melissa to predicting renewable energy supply and agricultural impacts, see ho...

Now, if you ask an AI a question, it will usually give you an absolute answer with unwavering authority, even if that answer turns out to be wrong. In fact, today's AI seems to be missing a fundamental human trait: self-doubt. Long before the current wave of large language models, one academic researcher was trying to give machines a sense of their own limitations. Zoubin Ghahramani has spent the last 30 years pioneering a type of ...

Neel and his team are trying to do something phenomenally difficult: understand an intelligence that didn't come with a manual. Together, they explore the cutting-edge "neuroscience" of artificial intelligence—revealing the surprising, elegant structures being discovered inside these networks (like spare autoencoders), the inherent limits of looking under the hood, and why interpretability is absolutely essential if we are to...

Timecodes:

• 00:00 Intro
• 1:07 Defining AI agents
• 4:44 Agentic exploration in science and research
• 15:46 Delegation between agents
• 22:46 Agentic security and traps
• 29:31 Building an agentic economy
• 33:22 Cognitive monoculture
• 36:29 Distributed intelligence 

To read the research, search for: Distributional AGI Safety, May 2026 Intelligent AI Delegation, February 2026 Virtual Agent Economies, September 2025 

Seoul, March 2016. Two players sit hunched over a 19x19 grid covered in a sea of black and white stones. They are playing the ancient game of Go - a game of unimaginable complexity long thought impossible for a machine to master. On one side is Lee Sedol (Sae Dol), a legendary 18-time Go world champion. On the other, AlphaGo, a neural network based AI system built on a powerful technique called reinforcement learning. In the blink ...

Thanks for joining us this year. 

🔔 Subscribe to stay updated on our return in 2026, and revisit our episode library to catch up on everything from driverless cars to drug discovery: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqYmG7hTraZBiUr6_Qf8YTS2Oqy3OGZEj

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Further reading

Levels of AGI paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.02462

The road to AGI (Google DeepMind Podcast, S2): https://youtu.be/Uy4OYU7PQYA

Thanks to everyone who made this possible, including but not limited to: 

• Presenter: Professor Hannah Fry
• Series Producer: Dan Hardoon
• Editor: Rami Tzabar 
• Commissioner & Producer: Emma Yousif
• Music composition: Eleni Shaw
• Audio engineer: Richard Courtice

Please leave us a r...

Learn more about AlphaFold: https://deepmind.google/science/alphafold/

Watch the story behind AlphaFold in The Thinking Game, now available for free: https://youtu.be/d95J8yzvjbQ

Thank you to everyone who made this possible, including but not limited to: 

• Presenter: Professor Hannah Fry
• Series Producer: Dan Hardoon
• Editor: Rami Tzabar
• Commissioner & Producer: Emma Yousif
• Music composition: Eleni Shaw
• Audio engineer: Richard Co...

Learn more about Waymo: https://waymo.com/

Thank you to everyone who made this possible, including but not limited to: 

• Presenter: Professor Hannah Fry
• Series Producer: Dan Hardoon
• Editor: Rami Tzabar
• Commissioner & Producer: Emma Yousif
• Music composition: Eleni Shaw
• Audio engineer: Richard Courtice
• Video editor: Anthony Le
• Audio engineer: Perry Rogantin
• Visual identity: Rob Ashley
• Commissioned by Google DeepMind

Please leav...

Further reading:

• CodeMender: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/introducing-codemender-an-ai-agent-for-code-security/
• Cybersecurity at Google: https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/ai-security-frontier-strategy-tools/
• Threat intelligence report: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/adversarial-misuse-generative-ai

Thanks to everyone who made this possible, including but not limited to: 

• ...

In this episode, Professor Hannah Fry speaks with Jack Parker-Holder and Shlomi Fruchter about Genie 3, a general-purpose world model that can generate an unprecedented diversity of interactive environments. The conversation covers how this model's auto-regressive nature allows for the creation of consistent, explorable worlds from text or image prompts, and how its capabilities differ from video generation models like Veo. 

Fu...

This week's episode is a slight departure from our usual deep dives. Join Paige Bailey, DevRel lead, as she guides Hannah Fry though some of her favorite AI tools. Having spent years understanding the 'what' of these models, Hannah finally gets to experience the 'how’ – from generating prompts and 'vibe coding', to creating her own version of the infamous spaghetti meme.

Learn more and try the tools yourself:

• Gemini: ...

Further reading:

• Natural forests of the world: paper, data and benchmarks
• Forest loss drivers: paper, summary from WRI, and blog from GFW
• Forest loss drivers code: Google Earth Engine; at WRI; at GFW; or Zenodo. 
• Deep learning based remote sensing (open source): Jeo, GeeFlow
• Species mapping paper: Arxiv
• Google resources: Google Earth Engine. Agri with Google, wildlife cameras
• Perch: code, paper
• Perch x coral reefs: Blog
• Agile Model...

In this episode, host Hannah Fry is joined by Max Jaderberg and Rebecca Paul of Isomorphic Labs to explore the future of drug discovery in the age of AI. They discuss how new technology, particularly AlphaFold 3, is revolutionizing the field by predicting the structure of life’s molecules, paving the way for faster and more efficient drug discovery.

They dig into the immense complexities of designing new drugs: How do you find...

In this episode, Hannah is joined by Carolina Parada, Senior Director and Head of Robotics at Google DeepMind. They explore the recent leap forward in robotic capabilities, highlighting advancements in multimodal understanding and embodied reasoning, which enable robots to interact with the physical world with unprecedented generality.

They dig into the two-system approach - ‘slow and fast thinking‘ - that enables both c...

In this episode, Professor Hannah Fry interviews Joelle Barral, Senior Director of Research at Google DeepMind, about AI in healthcare. They discuss existing AI applications including image analysis for diabetic retinopathy and the expansion of diagnostic tools as a result of multi-modal models. The conversation highlights AI's potential to improve healthcare delivery, personalize treatment, expand access worldwide, and ultimately,...

In this episode, Hannah is once again joined by Murray Shanahan, Professor of Cognitive Robotics at Imperial College London and Principal Scientist at Google DeepMind, for a philosophical deep dive on AI. They explore everything from consciousness and metacognition in animals, to symbolic AI and neural networks. Murray also shares insights into his involvement with the film 'Ex Machina' and discusses the idea of reasoning, anthropo...

In this episode of Google DeepMind: The Podcast, VP of Reinforcement Learning, David Silver, describes his vision for the future of AI, exploring the concept of the "era of experience" versus the current "era of human data". Using AlphaGo and AlphaZero as examples, he highlights how these systems surpassed human capabilities by engaging in reinforcement learning without prior human knowledge. This approach contrasts with large lang...