Gemini 2.0 and the Evolution of Agentic AI with Oriol Vinyals

This interview podcast features Professor Hannah Fry interviewing Oriol Vinyals, Vice President of Drastic Research and co-tech lead of Gemini, about the evolution of AI agents. The conversation begins by revisiting Vinyals' previous work on AI agents capable of playing StarCraft, then delves into the advancements in large language models and multimodal AI. Vinyals explains the two-phase training process (pre-training/imitation learning and reinforcement learning) used to develop these agents, highlighting the challenges of scaling and achieving truly general AI. He discusses Gemini's new features, including agentic capabilities that allow the AI to interact with the real world through a browser or search engine, and explores the potential for AI to perform complex tasks like planning and reasoning. The discussion concludes by considering the possibility of achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and the role of scaling and specialized applications in reaching that goal.