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 complex reasoning and rapid, reactive movements. Using examples from robots learning dexterous tasks such as tying shoelaces to adapting to entirely new scenarios in real-time, Parada highlights how key breakthroughs in understanding, dexterity, and control are now coming together to rapidly advance robotics unlike ever before.

Further reading/viewing:

• Gemini Robotics
• Advances in robot dexterity
• Gemini Robotics x YouTube

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: Eleni Shaw
• Audio Engineer: Richard Courtice
• Production Manager: Dan Lazard
• Video Studio Production: Nicholas Duke Video
• Director: Bernardo Resende
• Video Editor: Bilal Merhi
• Audio Engineer: Perry Rogantin
• Camera and Lighting Operator: Robert Messere
• Production Coordination: Zoey Roberts, Sarah Ellen Morton
• Visual Identity and Design: Rob Ashley
• Commissioned by Google DeepMind

Please leave us a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts if you enjoyed this episode. We always want to hear from our audience whether that's in the form of feedback, new idea or a guest recommendation!

Please leave us a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts if you enjoyed this episode. We always want to hear from our audience whether that's in the form of feedback, new idea or a guest recommendation!

Further reading:

• Med-Gemini
• AMIE

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: Eleni Shaw
• Audio Engineer: Richard Courtice
• Production Manager: Dan Lazard
• Video Studio Production: Nicholas Duke Video
• Director: Bernardo Resende
• Video Editor: Bilal Merhi
• Audio Engineer: Perry Rogantin
• Camera and Lighting Operator: Robert Messere
• Production Coordination: Zoey Roberts, Sarah Ellen Morton
• Visual Identity and Design: Rob Ashley
• Commissioned by Google DeepMind

Please leave us a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts if you enjoyed this episode. We always want to hear from our audience whether that's in the form of feedback, new idea or a guest recommendation!

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, anthropomorphism, and the future of AI.

Further reading / listening:

• Toward the future, S1 Ep 7: https://youtu.be/yf31XT1G1RQ?si=6mAEsQhKwKPWk9oH

___

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
• Production Manager: Dan Lazard
• Video Director: Bernardo Resende
• Video Editor: Alex Baro Cayetano, Bilal Merhi
• Audio Engineer: Richard Courtice
• Camera and Lighting Operator: Robert Messere
• Production Coordination: Zoey Roberts, Sarah Ellen Morton
• Visual Identity and Design: Rob Ashley
• Commissioned by Google DeepMind

___

• Subscribe to our channel to watch every episode: https://www.youtube.com/@googledeepmind

Please leave us a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts if you enjoyed this episode. We always want to hear from our audience whether that's in the form of feedback, new idea or a guest recommendation!

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 language models, which depend on human data and feedback. Silver emphasizes the need to explore this path to drive AI progress and achieve artificial superintelligence.

Timestamps

• 00:00 Introduction
• 01:50 Era of experience
• 03:45 AlphaZero
• 10:19 Move 37
• 15:20 Reinforcement learning and human feedback
• 24:30 AlphaProof
• 29:50 Math Olympiads
• 35:00 Experience based methods
• 42:56 Hannah's reflections
• 44:00 Fan Hui joins

___

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

• Presenter: Professor Hannah Fry
• Series Producer: Dan Hardoon
• Series Editor: Rami Tzabar
• Commissioner & Producer: Emma Yousif
• Music Composition: Eleni Shaw
• Audio Engineer: Richard Courtice
• Production Manager: Dan Lazard
• Video Director and Editor: Bernardo Resende
• Video Studio Production: Nicholas Duke
• Video Editor: Bilal Merhi
• Audio Engineer: Perry Rogantin
• Camera and Lighting Operator: Robert Messere
• Production Coordination: Zoey Roberts, Sarah Ellen Morton
• Visual Identity and Design: Rob Ashley
• Commissioned by Google DeepMind

Please leave us a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts if you enjoyed this episode. We always want to hear from our audience whether that's in the form of feedback, new idea or a guest recommendation!

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 reading / listening:

• Gemini 2.0
• Project Astra
• Decoding Google Gemini with Jeff Dean
• Gaming, Goats & General Intelligence with Frederic Besse

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

• Presenter: Professor Hannah Fry
• Series Producer: Dan Hardoon
• Editor: Rami Tzabar, TellTale Studios
• Commissioner & Producer: Emma Yousif
• Music composition: Eleni Shaw
• Camera Director and Video Editor: Bernardo Resende
• Audio Engineer: Perry Rogantin
• Video Studio Production: Nicholas Duke
• Video Editor: Bilal Merhi
• Video Production Design: James Barton
• Visual Identity and Design: Eleanor Tomlinson
• Commissioned by Google DeepMind

Please like and subscribe on your preferred podcast platform. Want to share feedback? Or have a suggestion for a guest that we should have on next? Leave us a comment on YouTube and stay tuned for future episodes.

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 processes. They close on a quick whirlwind tour of some of the new agentic capabilities recently released by Google DeepMind.

Note: To see all of the full length demos, including unedited versions, and other videos related to Gemini 2.0 head to YouTube.

Future reading/watching:

• Gemini 2.0
• Decoding Google Gemini with Jeff Dean
• Gaming, Goats & General Intelligence with Frederic Besse

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

Presenter: Professor Hannah Fry

Series Producer: Dan Hardoon

Editor: Rami Tzabar, TellTale Studios

Commissioner & Producer: Emma Yousif

Music composition: Eleni Shaw

Camera Director and Video Editor: Bernardo Resende

Audio Engineer: Perry Rogantin

Video Studio Production: Nicholas Duke

Video Editor: Bilal Merhi

Video Production Design: James Barton

Visual Identity and Design: Eleanor Tomlinson

Commissioned by Google DeepMind

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Please like and subscribe on your preferred podcast platform. Want to share feedback? Or have a suggestion for a guest that we should have on next? Leave us a comment on YouTube and stay tuned for future episodes.

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 emphasises the importance of a nuanced approach to regulation, focusing on adaptability and evidence-based policymaking. He highlights the complexities of assessing risk and reward in emerging technologies, advocating for a focus on harm reduction.

Further reading/watching:

• AI Principles: https://ai.google/responsibility/principles/
• Frontier Model Forum: https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/public-policy/google-microsoft-openai-anthropic-frontier-model-forum/
• Ethics of AI assistants with Iason Gabriel https://youtu.be/aaZc-as-soA?si=0ThbYY30FlO31kKQ

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

• Presenter: Professor Hannah Fry
• Series Producer: Dan Hardoon
• Editor: Rami Tzabar, TellTale Studios
• Commissioner & Producer: Emma Yousif
• Music composition: Eleni Shaw
• Camera Director and Video Editor: Bernardo Resende
• Audio Engineer: Perry Rogantin
• Video Studio Production: Nicholas Duke
• Video Editor: Bilal Merhi
• Video Production Design: James Barton
• Visual Identity and Design: Eleanor Tomlinson
• Commissioned by Google DeepMind

Please like and subscribe on your preferred podcast platform. Want to share feedback? Or have a suggestion for a guest that we should have on next? Leave us a comment on YouTube and stay tuned for future episodes.

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, personal journals, sales decks, and more.

Join Raiza Martin and Steven Johnson from Google Labs, Google’s testing ground for products, as they guide host Hannah Fry through the technical advancements that have made NotebookLM possible. In this episode they'll explore what it means to be interesting, the challenges of generating natural-sounding speech, as well as exciting new modalities on the horizon.

Further reading

• Try NotebookLM here
• Read about the speech generation technology behind Audio Overveiws: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/pushing-the-frontiers-of-audio-generation/

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

Presenter: Professor Hannah Fry

Series Producer: Dan Hardoon

Editor: Rami Tzabar, TellTale Studios

Commissioner & Producer: Emma Yousif

Music composition: Eleni Shaw

Camera Director and Video Editor: Daniel Lazard

Audio Engineer: Perry Rogantin

Video Studio Production: Nicholas Duke

Video Editor: Alex Baro Cayetano, Daniel Lazard

Video Production Design: James Barton

Visual Identity and Design: Eleanor Tomlinson

Commissioned by Google DeepMind

Please like and subscribe on your preferred podcast platform. Want to share feedback? Or have a suggestion for a guest that we should have on next? Leave us a comment on YouTube and stay tuned for future episodes.