Google DeepMind: The Podcast

In this episode, Professor Hannah Fry sits down with Pushmeet Kohli, VP of Research at Google DeepMind to discuss AI’s impact on scientific discovery. They go on a whirlwind tour of scientific projects, touching on recent breakthroughs in AlphaFold, material science, weather forecasting, and mathematics to better understand how AI can enhance our scientific understanding of the world.

Further reading:

• Millions of new materials di...

Games are a very good training ground for agents. Think about it. Perfectly packaged, neatly constrained environments where agents can run wild, work out the rules for themselves, and learn how to handle autonomy. In this episode, Research Engineering Team Lead, Frederic Besse, joins Hannah as they discuss important research like SIMA (Scalable Instructable Multiworld Agent) and what we can expect from future agents that can unders...

Professor Hannah Fry is joined by Jeff Dean, one of the most legendary figures in computer science and chief scientist of Google DeepMind and Google Research. Jeff was instrumental to the field in the late 1990s, writing the code that transformed Google from a small startup into the multinational company it is today. Hannah and Jeff discuss it all - from the early days of Google and neural networks, to the long term potential of mu...

 Building safe and capable models is one of the greatest challenges of our time. Can we make AI work for everyone? How do we prevent existential threats? Why is alignment so important? Join Professor Hannah Fry as she delves into these critical questions with Anca Dragan, lead for AI safety and alignment at Google DeepMind. 

For further reading, search "Introducing the Frontier Safety Framework" and "Evaluating Frontier Models for D...

Professor Hannah Fry is joined by Google DeepMind's senior research director Douglas Eck to explore AI's capacity for true creativity. They delve into the complexities of defining creativity, the challenges of AI generated content and attribution, and whether AI can help us to connect with each other in new and meaningful ways. 

Want to watch the full episode? Subscribe to Google DeepMind's YouTube page and stay tuned for new episod...

It has been a few years since Google DeepMind CEO and co-founder, Demis Hassabis, and Professor Hannah Fry caught up.

In that time, the world has caught on to artificial intelligence—in a big way. Listen as they discuss the recent explosion of interest in AI, what Demis means when he describes chatbots as ‘unreasonably effective’, and the unexpected emergence of capabilities like conceptual understanding and abstraction in recent ge...

Hannah wraps up the series by meeting DeepMind co-founder and CEO, Demis Hassabis. In an extended interview, Demis describes why he believes AGI is possible, how we can get there, and the problems he hopes it will solve. Along the way, he highlights the important role of consciousness and why he’s so optimistic that AI can help solve many of the world’s major challenges. As a final note, Demis shares the story of a personal meeting...

AI needs to benefit everyone, not just those who build it. But fulfilling this promise requires careful thought before new technologies are built and released into the world. In this episode, Hannah delves into some of the most pressing and difficult ethical and social questions surrounding AI today. She explores complex issues like racial and gender bias and the misuse of AI technologies, and hears why diversity and representation...

AI doesn’t just exist in the lab, it’s already solving a range of problems in the real world. In this episode, Hannah encounters a realistic recreation of her voice by WaveNet, the voice synthesising system that powers the Google Assistant and helps people with speech difficulties and illnesses regain their voices. Hannah also discovers how ‘deepfake’ technology can be used to improve weather forecasting and how DeepMind researcher...

Step inside DeepMind's laboratories and you'll find researchers studying DNA to understand the mysteries of life, seeking new ways to use nuclear energy, or putting AI to the test in mind-bending areas of maths. In this episode, Hannah meets Pushmeet Kohli, the head of science at DeepMind, to understand how AI is accelerating scientific progress. Listeners also join Hannah on a [virtual] safari in the Serengeti in East Africa to fi...

Hannah meets DeepMind co-founder and chief scientist Shane Legg, the man who coined the phrase ‘artificial general intelligence’, and explores how it might be built. Why does Shane think AGI is possible? When will it be realised? And what could it look like? Hannah also explores a simple theory of using trial and error to reach AGI and takes a deep dive into MuZero, an AI system which mastered complex board games from chess to Go, ...

Do you need a body to have intelligence? And can one exist without the other? Hannah takes listeners behind the scenes of DeepMind's robotics lab in London where she meets robots that are trying to independently learn new skills, and explores why physical intelligence is a necessary part of intelligence. Along the way, she finds out how researchers trained their robots at home during lockdown, uncovers why so many robotics demonstr...

Cooperation is at the heart of our society. Inventing the railway, giving birth to the Renaissance, and creating the Covid-19 vaccine all required people to combine efforts. But cooperation is so much more. It governs our education systems, healthcare, and food production. In this episode, Hannah meets the researchers working on cooperative AI, and hears about their work and influences from the famous American psychologist - and pi...

In December 2019, DeepMind’s AI system, AlphaFold, solved a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology, known as the protein-folding problem. A headline in the journal Nature read, “It will change everything” and the President of the UK's Royal Society called it a “stunning advance [that arrived] decades before many in the field would have predicted”. In this episode, Hannah uncovers the inside story of AlphaFold from the people who ma...

Hannah explores the potential of language models, the questions they raise, and if teaching a computer about language is enough to create artificial general intelligence (AGI). Beyond helping us communicate ideas, language plays a crucial role in memory, cooperation, and thinking – which is why AI researchers have long aimed to communicate with computers using natural language. Recently, there has been extraordinary progress using ...

The chart-topping podcast which uncovers the extraordinary ways artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming our world is back for a second season. Join mathematician and broadcaster Professor Hannah Fry behind the scenes of world-leading AI research lab DeepMind to get the inside story of how AI is being created – and how it can benefit our lives and the society we live in.

Recorded over six months and featuring over 30 original in...

In this special extended episode, Hannah Fry meets Demis Hassabis, the CEO and co-founder of DeepMind. She digs into his former life as a chess player, games designer and neuroscientist and explores how his love of chess helped him to get start-up funding, what drives him and his vision, and why AI keeps him up at night.

If you have a question or feedback on the series, message us on Twitter (@DeepMind using the hashtag #DMpodcast) ...

AI researchers around the world are trying to create a general purpose learning system that can learn to solve a broad range of problems without being taught how. Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind’s Director of Research, describes the journey to get there, and takes Hannah on a whistle-stop tour of DeepMind’s HQ and its research.

If you have a question or feedback on the series, message us on Twitter (@DeepMind using the hashtag #DMpodcas...

While there is a lot of excitement about AI research, there are also concerns about the way it might be implemented, used and abused. In this episode Hannah investigates the more human side of the technology, some ethical issues around how it is developed and used, and the efforts to create a future of AI that works for everyone.

If you have a question or feedback on the series, message us on Twitter (@DeepMind using the hashtag #DM...