Google DeepMind: The Podcast

Neel and his team are trying to do something phenomenally difficult: understand an intelligence that didn't come with a manual. Together, they explore the cutting-edge "neuroscience" of artificial intelligence—revealing the surprising, elegant structures being discovered inside these networks (like spare autoencoders), the inherent limits of looking under the hood, and why interpretability is absolutely essential if we are to build safe, aligned and trustworthy AI as we move towards AGI. Learn more about this area of research via https://deepmind.google/

Timecodes

00:00 Introduction

02:41 Motivation for interpretability research

04:01 Mechanistic interpretability

08:14 Chain of thought monitoring

18:14 Interpretability techniques

35:00 Auditing models for safety

48:53 What comes next for interpretability

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.

Timecodes:

00:00 Intro

1:07 Defining AI agents

4:44 Agentic exploration in science and research

15:46 Delegation between agents

22:46 Agentic security and traps

29:31 Building an agentic economy

33:22 Cognitive monoculture

36:29 Distributed intelligence 

To read the research, search for: Distributional AGI Safety, May 2026 Intelligent AI Delegation, February 2026 Virtual Agent Economies, September 2025 

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.

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 of an eye, the world changed. Exactly one decade later, we look back at the match that sparked the modern AI revolution. From algorithmic discovery to the solving of scientific grand challenges like protein folding, the foundation was laid right there on that wooden board. 

Join Hannah Fry, Pushmeet Kohli (VP, Science) and Thore Graepel (AlphaGo team & Distinguished Research Scientist) as they unpick the legacy of AlphaGo. 

🎥 AlphaGo https://youtu.be/WXuK6gekU1Y 

🎥 The Thinking Game: https://youtu.be/d95J8yzvjbQ

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.

Thanks for joining us this year. 
🔔 Subscribe to stay updated on our return in 2026, and revisit our episode library to catch up on everything from driverless cars to drug discovery: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqYmG7hTraZBiUr6_Qf8YTS2Oqy3OGZEj

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.

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 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.