Sebastian Mallaby

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195 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 3 Apr

Sebastian Mallaby’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.

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Hard Fork · The Future of Addictive Design + Going Deep at DeepMind + HatGPT · 3 Apr 2026 podcast

And it's not that he was wrong in the sense that now we see world models come back in 2026 as a big area of excitement and research.

But back in 2018, 2019, he was missing the fact that a huge amount of knowledge about how the real world works is in fact in language if you download all the language on the internet.

And he missed how much you could squeeze out of language as a training set.

Yeah, I would say that the DeepMind special source right from the beginning was to try to put those two things together.

It's interesting, for example, that with AlphaGo, the early research on that, Ilya Satskofer contributed to it.

And of course, he was the sort of leading practitioner of deep learning, went on to be OpenAI's chief scientist.

But at the time, he was working for Google because Google had acquired his boutique.

And so the reinforcement learning people in London working for DeepMind collaborated with the deep learning people in Mountain View, and that's what produced the AlphaGo breakthrough.

So I think you're right.

There are these two strands within AI of reinforcement learning, which I would describe as learning through experience, interaction with the real world through trial and error.

And on the other hand, learning through data, and that is the deep learning,

And for humans, you could think of it as being, you know, you can go to the library and read all the books, and that would be deep learning.

You're learning from data, from sort of crystallized human knowledge.

Or you can go out there in the real world and learn about stuff by planting your garden and whatever.

So what happened was that when they sold DeepMind to Google in 2014, they had a rival offer from Facebook.

And Facebook actually offered them more cash.

And one of the reasons they said no was that they wanted safety protections around their technology.

And so they had this deal.

It was going to be a safety and ethics board.

And Google promised that.

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