Google DeepMind: The Podcast

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. 

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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...

In our final episode for the year, we explore Project Astra, a research prototype exploring future capabilities of a universal AI assistant that can understand the world around you. Host Hannah Fry is joined by Greg Wayne, Director in Research at Google DeepMind. They discuss the inspiration behind the research prototype, its current strengths and limitations, as well as potential future use cases. Hannah even gets the chance to pu...

In this episode, Hannah is joined by Oriol Vinyals, VP of Drastic Research and Gemini co-lead. They discuss the evolution of agents from single-task models to more general-purpose models capable of broader applications, like Gemini. Vinyals guides Hannah through the two-step process behind multi modal models: pre-training (imitation learning) and post-training (reinforcement learning). They discuss the complexities of scaling and t...

There is broad consensus across the tech industry, governments and society, that as artificial intelligence becomes more embedded in every aspect of our world, regulation will be essential. But what does this look like? Can it be adopted without stifling innovation? Are current frameworks presented by government leaders headed in the right direction?

Join host Hannah Fry as she discusses these questions and more with Nicklas Lundbla...

NotebookLM is a research assistant powered by Gemini that draws on expertise from storytelling to present information in an engaging way. It allows users to upload their own documents and generate insights, explanations, and—more recently—podcasts. This feature, also known as audio overviews, has captured the imagination of millions of people worldwide, who have created thousands of engaging podcasts ranging from person...