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 put Project Astra's multilingual skills to the test. Further readin...
Dec 20, 2024•46 min•Ep 13•Transcript available on Metacast 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 the importance of innovation in architecture and training processe...
Dec 12, 2024•49 min•Ep 12•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Lundblad, Director of Public Policy at Google DeepMind. Nicklas emphasi...
Dec 05, 2024•53 min•Ep 11•Transcript available on Metacast 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 personal narratives to educational explainers using source materials like CVs, pers...
Nov 26, 2024•44 min•Ep 10•Transcript available on Metacast Join Professor Hannah Fry at the AI for Science Forum for a fascinating conversation with Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis. They explore how AI is revolutionizing scientific discovery, delving into topics like the nuclear pore complex, plastic-eating enzymes, quantum computing, and the surprising power of Turing machines. The episode also features a special 'ask me anything' session with Nobel Laureates Sir Paul Nurse, Jennifer Doudna, and John Jumper, who answer audience questions about the f...
Nov 21, 2024•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast Imagine a future where we interact regularly with a range of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) assistants — and where millions of assistants interact with each other on our behalf. These experiences and interactions may soon become part of our everyday reality. In this episode, host Hannah Fry and Google DeepMind Senior Staff Research Scientist Iason Gabriel discuss the ethical implications of advanced AI assistants. Drawing from Iason's recent paper, they examine value alignment, anthropomo...
Nov 11, 2024•44 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast How human should an AI tutor be? What does ‘good’ teaching look like? Will AI lead in the classroom, or take a back seat to human instruction? Will everyone have their own personalized AI tutor? Join research lead, Irina Jurenka, and Professor Hannah Fry as they explore the complicated yet exciting world of AI in education. Further reading: Towards Responsible Development of Generative AI for Education: An Evaluation-Driven Approach Thanks to everyone who made this possible, including but not li...
Oct 23, 2024•40 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast 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 discovered with deep learning GraphCast: AI model for faster and more...
Oct 09, 2024•47 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast 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 understand and safely carry out a wide range of tasks - online and in t...
Sep 25, 2024•40 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast 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 multi-modal models like Gemini. Thanks to everyone who made this po...
Sep 11, 2024•53 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Dangerous Capabilities". Thanks to everyone who made this possible,...
Aug 28, 2024•38 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast 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 episodes. Further reading: Veo Imagen SynthID An update on web publishe...
Aug 14, 2024•41 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast 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 generative models. Demis and Hannah also explore the need for rigo...
Aug 14, 2024•50 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast 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 with Stephen Hawking to discuss the future of AI and discloses H...
Mar 15, 2022•30 min•Ep 9•Transcript available on Metacast 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 is vital for building technology that works for all. For questio...
Mar 01, 2022•33 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast 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 researchers are collaborating with Liverpool Football Club, aiming to take ...
Feb 22, 2022•36 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast 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 find out how researchers are using AI to conserve wildlife in one o...
Feb 16, 2022•34 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast 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, and is now generalising to solve a range of important tasks in th...
Feb 15, 2022•33 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast 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 demonstrations are faking it, and what it takes to train a robotic footba...
Feb 08, 2022•34 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast 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 pigeon trainer - BF Skinner to the strategic board game Diplomacy. ...
Feb 01, 2022•35 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast 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 large-language models (LLM), which learn how to speak by processi...
Jan 25, 2022•38 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast 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 made it happen and finds out how it could help transform the future...
Jan 25, 2022•39 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast 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 interviews, including DeepMind co-founders Demis Hassabis and Shan...
Jan 10, 2022•3 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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) or email us at podcast@deepmind.com . Further reading: Wired: I...
Sep 17, 2019•37 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast 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 #DMpodcast) or email us at podcast@deepmind.com . Further reading: OpenA...
Sep 10, 2019•26 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast 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 #DMpodcast) or email us at podcast@deepmind.com . Further reading:...
Sep 03, 2019•29 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast The ambition of much of AI research is to create systems that can help to solve problems in the real world. In this episode, Hannah meets the people building systems that could be used to save the sight of thousands, help us solve one of the most fundamental problems in biology and reduce energy consumption in an effort to combat climate change. But whilst there is great potential, there are also important obstacles that will need to be tackled for AI to be used effectively, safely and fairly. I...
Aug 27, 2019•31 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast Forget what sci-fi has told you about superintelligent robots that are uncannily human-like; the reality is more prosaic. Inside DeepMind’s robotics laboratory, Hannah explores what researchers call ‘embodied AI’: robot arms that are learning tasks like picking up plastic bricks, which humans find comparatively easy. Discover the cutting-edge challenges of bringing AI and robotics together, and learning from scratch how to perform tasks. She also explores some of the key questions about using AI...
Aug 20, 2019•33 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast Video games have become a favourite tool for AI researchers to test the abilities of their systems. In this episode, Hannah sits down to play StarCraft II - a challenging video game that requires players to control the onscreen action with as many as 800 clicks a minute. She is guided by Oriol Vinyals, an ex-professional StarCraft player and research scientist at DeepMind, who explains how the program AlphaStar learnt to play the game and beat a top professional player. Elsewhere, she explores s...
Aug 20, 2019•27 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast In March 2016, more than 200 million people watched AlphaGo become first computer program to defeat a professional human player at the game of Go, a milestone in AI research that was considered to be a decade ahead of its time. Since then the team has continued to develop the system and recently unveiled AlphaZero: a program that has taught itself how to play chess, Go, and shogi. Hannah explores the inside story of both with Lead Researcher David Silver and finds out why games are a useful prov...
Aug 20, 2019•26 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast 
