Google DeepMind: The Podcast

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 of healthcare and medicine.

For questions or feedback on the series, message us on Twitter @DeepMind or email [email protected]. 

Interviewees: DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, John Jumper, Kathryn Tunyasunakool and Sasha Brown; Charles Mowbray and Monique Wasuna of the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi]) & John McGeehan of the Centre for Enzyme Innovation at the University of Portsmouth

Credits

Presenter: Hannah Fry

Series Producer: Dan Hardoon

Production support: Jill Achineku

Sounds design: Emma Barnaby

Music composition: Eleni Shaw

Sound Engineer: Nigel Appleton

Editor: David Prest

Commissioned by DeepMind

Thank you to everyone who made this season possible! 

Further reading: 

AlphaFold blog, DeepMind: https://deepmind.com/blog/article/alphafold-a-solution-to-a-50-year-old-grand-challenge-in-biology

AlphaFold case study, DeepMind: https://deepmind.com/research/case-studies/alphafold

It will change everything, Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03348-4

AlphaFold Is The Most Important Achievement In AI—Ever, Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/robtoews/2021/10/03/alphafold-is-the-most-important-achievement-in-ai-ever/?sh=359278426e0a

Bacteria found to eat PET plastics, NewScientist: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2080279-bacteria-found-to-eat-pet-plastics-could-help-do-the-recycling/

Protein Structure Prediction Center: https://predictioncenter.org/

An interview with Professor John McGeehan, BBSRC: https://bbsrc.ukri.org/news/features/enzyme-science/an-interview-with-professor-john-mcgeehan/

John McGeehan profile, University of Portsmouth: https://researchportal.port.ac.uk/en/persons/john-mcgeehan

Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi): https://dndi.org/

A doctor’s dream, DNDi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tk31iucWYdE

The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry, BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07dx75g/episodes/downloads

Hannah Fry: 

https://hannahfry.co.uk/

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!

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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 processing huge amounts of data from the internet. The results can be very convincing, but pose significant ethical challenges. 

For questions or feedback on the series, message us on Twitter @DeepMind or email [email protected]. 

Interviewees: DeepMind’s Geoffrey Irving, Chris Dyer, Angeliki Lazaridou, Lisa-Anne Hendriks & Laura Weidinger 

Credits

Presenter: Hannah Fry

Series Producer: Dan Hardoon

Production support: Jill Achineku

Sounds design: Emma Barnaby

Music composition: Eleni Shaw

Sound Engineer: Nigel Appleton

Editor: David Prest

Commissioned by DeepMind

Thank you to everyone who made this season possible! 

Further reading: 

GPT-3 Powers the Next Generation of Apps, OpenAI: https://openai.com/blog/gpt-3-apps/

https://web.stanford.edu/class/linguist238/p36-weizenabaum.pdf

Never Mind the Computer 1983 about the ELIZA program, BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p023kpf8

How Large Language Models Will Transform Science, Society, and AI, Stanford University: https://hai.stanford.edu/news/how-large-language-models-will-transform-science-society-and-ai

Challenges in Detoxifying Language Models, DeepMind: https://deepmind.com/research/publications/2021/Challenges-in-Detoxifying-Language-Models

Extending Machine Language Models toward Human-Level Language Understanding, DeepMind: https://deepmind.com/research/publications/2020/Extending-Machine-Language-Models-toward-Human-Level-Language-Understanding

Language modelling at scale, DeepMind: https://deepmind.com/blog/article/language-modelling-at-scale

Artificial general intelligence, Technology Review: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/15/1010461/artificial-general-intelligence-robots-ai-agi-deepmind-google-openai/

A Definition of Machine Intelligence by Shane Legg, arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/0712.3329

Stuart Russell - Living With Artificial Intelligence, BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001216k/episodes/player

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!

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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 Shane Legg, the podcast gives listeners exclusive access to the brilliant people building the technology of the future. Throughout nine original episodes, Hannah discovers how DeepMind is using AI to advance science in critical areas, like solving a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology and developing nuclear fusion.

Listeners hear stories of teaching robots to walk at home during lockdown, as well as using AI to forecast weather, help people regain their voices, and enhance game strategies with Liverpool Football Club. Hannah also takes an in-depth look at the challenges and potential of building artificial general intelligence (AGI) and explores what it takes to ensure AI is built to benefit society.

“I hope this series gives people a better understanding of AI and a feeling for just how exhilarating an endeavour it is.” – Demis Hassabis, CEO and Co-Founder of DeepMind

For questions or feedback on the series, message us on Twitter @DeepMind or email [email protected].

Credits
Presenter: Hannah Fry
Series Producer: Dan Hardoon
Production support: Jill Achineku
Sounds design: Emma Barnaby
Music composition: Eleni Shaw
Sound Engineer: Nigel Appleton
Editor: David Prest
Commissioned by 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!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 [email protected].

Further reading:

• Wired: Inside DeepMind's epic mission to solve science's trickiest problem
• Quanta magazine: How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Science
• Demis Hassabis: A systems neuroscience approach to building AGI. Talk at the 2010 Singularity Summit
• Demis Hassabis: The power of self-learning systems. Talk at MIT 2019
• Demis Hassabis: Talk on Creativity and AI
• Financial Times: The mind in the machine: Demis Hassabis on artificial intelligence (2017)
• The Times: Interview with Demis Hassabis
• The Economist Babbage podcast: DeepMind Games
• Interview with Demis Hassabis from the book Game Changer, which also features an introduction from Demis

Interviewees: Deepmind CEO and co-founder, Demis Hassabis

Credits:
Presenter: Hannah Fry
Editor: David Prest
Senior Producer: Louisa Field
Producers: Amy Racs, Dan Hardoon
Binaural Sound: Lucinda Mason-Brown
Music composition: Eleni Shaw (with help from Sander Dieleman and WaveNet)
Commissioned by 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!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 [email protected].

Further reading:
OpenAI: An overview of neural networks and the progress that has been made in AI
Shane Legg, DeepMind co-founder: Measuring machine intelligence at the 2010 Singularity Summit
Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter: Paper on defining machine intelligence
Demis Hassabis: Talk on the history, frontiers and capabilities of AI
Robert Wiblin: Positively shaping the development of artificial intelligence
Asilomar AI Principles
Richard S. Sutton and Andrew G. Barto: Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction

Interviewees: Koray Kavukcuoglu, Director of Research; Trevor Back, Product Manager for DeepMind’s science research; research scientists Raia Hadsell and Murray Shanahan; and DeepMind CEO and co-founder, Demis Hassabis.

Credits:
Presenter: Hannah Fry
Editor: David Prest
Senior Producer: Louisa Field
Producers: Amy Racs, Dan Hardoon
Binaural Sound: Lucinda Mason-Brown
Music composition: Eleni Shaw (with help from Sander Dieleman and WaveNet)
Commissioned by 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!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 [email protected].

Further reading:

1. The Partnership on AI
2. ProPublica: investigation into machine bias in criminal sentencing
3. Science Museum – free exhibition: Driverless: who is in control (until Oct 2020)
4. Survival of the best fit: An interactive game that demonstrates some of the ways in which bias can be introduced into AI systems, in this case for hiring
5. Joy Buolamwini: AI, Ain’t I a Woman: A spoken word piece exploring AI bias, and systems not recognising prominent black women
6. Hannah Fry: Hello World - How to be Human in the Age of the Machine
7. DeepMind: Safety and Ethics
8. Future of Humanity Institute: AI Governance:A Research Agenda

Interviewees: Verity Harding, Co-Lead of DeepMind Ethics and Society; DeepMind’s COO Lila Ibrahim, and research scientists William Isaac and Silvia Chiappa.

Credits:
Presenter: Hannah Fry
Editor: David Prest
Senior Producer: Louisa Field
Producers: Amy Racs, Dan Hardoon
Binaural Sound: Lucinda Mason-Brown
Music composition: Eleni Shaw (with help from Sander Dieleman and WaveNet)
Commissioned by 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!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.

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

Further reading:

• Wired: Inside DeepMind's epic mission to solve science's trickiest problem
• DeepMind blogs on the partnership with Moorfields NHS eye hospital and predicting eye disease, and Moorfields’ news announcement on its research with DeepMind
• DeepMind blog: AlphaFold: Using AI for scientific discovery
• DeepMind blogs on reducing Google’s energy bill for datacentre cooling and how this project has progressed
• Research paper: Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning
• Quanta magazine: How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Science
• DeepMind blog: How evolutionary selection can train more capable self-driving cars

Other examples of the application of AI for real-world impact include:

• Francis Crick Institute: machine learning models that can help predict heart disease
• NASA: AUDREY machine learning system to better guide first responders through fires
• University of Southern California: Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security using AI to help wildlife conservation

Interviewees: Pearse Keane, consultant ophthalmologist at Moorfields Eye Hospital; Sandy Nelson, Product Manager for DeepMind’s Science Program; and DeepMind Program Manager Sims Witherspoon.

Credits:
Presenter: Hannah Fry
Editor: David Prest
Senior Producer: Louisa Field
Producers: Amy Racs, Dan Hardoon
Binaural Sound: Lucinda Mason-Brown
Music composition: Eleni Shaw (with help from Sander Dieleman and WaveNet)
Commissioned by 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!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 safely in the real world.

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

Further reading:

• Blogs on AI safety and further resources from Victoria Krakovna
• The Future of Life Institute: The risks and benefits of AI
• The Wall Street Journal: Protecting Against AI’s Existential Threat
• TED Talks: Max Tegmark - How to get empowered, not overpowered, by AI
• Royal Society lecture series sponsored by DeepMind: You & AI
• Nick Bostrom: Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers and Strategies (book)
• OpenAI: Learning from Human Preferences
• DeepMind blog: Learning from human preferences
• DeepMind blog: Learning by playing - how robots can tidy up after themselves
• DeepMind blog: AI safety

Interviewees: Software engineer Jackie Kay and research scientists Murray Shanahan, Victoria Krakovna, Raia Hadsell and Jan Leike.

Credits:
Presenter: Hannah Fry
Editor: David Prest
Senior Producer: Louisa Field
Producers: Amy Racs, Dan Hardoon
Binaural Sound: Lucinda Mason-Brown
Music composition: Eleni Shaw (with help from Sander Dieleman and WaveNet)
Commissioned by 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!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 systems that are learning to cooperate in a digital version of the playground favourite ‘Capture the Flag’.

If you have a question or feedback on the series, message us on Twitter (@DeepMind using the hashtag #DMpodcast) or emailing us at [email protected].

Further reading

• The Economist: Why AI researchers like video games
• DeepMind blogs: Capture the Flag and Alphastar
• Professional StarCraft II player MaNa gives his impressions of AlphaStar and DeepMind
• Open AI’s work on Dota 2 
• The New York Times: DeepMind can now beat us at multiplayer games, too
• Royal Society: Machine Learning resources
• DeepMind: The Inside Story of AlphaStar 
• Andrej Karpathy: Deep Reinforcement Learning: Pong from Pixels

Interviewees: Research scientists Max Jaderberg and Raia Hadsell; Lead researchers David Silver and Oriol Vinyals, and Director of Research Koray Kavukcuoglu.

Credits:
Presenter: Hannah Fry
Editor: David Prest
Senior Producer: Louisa Field
Producers: Amy Racs, Dan Hardoon
Binaural Sound: Lucinda Mason-Brown
Music composition: Eleni Shaw (with help from Sander Dieleman and WaveNet)
Commissioned by 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!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 proving ground for AI researchers. She also meets Chess Grandmaster Matthew Sadler and women’s international master Natasha Regan, who have written a book on AlphaZero and its unique gameplay.

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

Further reading

• AlphaGo the documentary
• The Surrounding Game: Documentary about the ancient game of Go
• DeepMind website: AlphaGo
• Garry Kasparov: Deep Thinking
• AI: More than Human - Exhibition at the Barbican Centre, 2019 and online exhibit
• DeepMind blog: AlphaZero: Shedding new light on chess, shogi, and Go
• Matthew Sadler and Natasha Regan: Game Changer - a book about chess and AI
• WIRED: What the AI behind AlphaGo can teach us about being human

Interviewees: DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, Matthew Sadler, chess Grandmaster; Lead Researcher David Silver, Matt Botvinick, Director of Neuroscience Research; and Natasha Regan, women’s international chess master.

Credits:
Presenter: Hannah Fry
Editor: David Prest
Senior Producer: Louisa Field
Producers: Amy Racs, Dan Hardoon
Binaural Sound: Lucinda Mason-Brown
Music composition: Eleni Shaw (with help from Sander Dieleman and WaveNet)
Commissioned by 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!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.