#214 Learning & Memory, For Brains & AI, with Kim Stachenfeld, Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind

Memory, the foundation of human intelligence, is still one of the most complex and mysterious aspects of the brain. Despite decades of research, we've only scratched the surface of understanding how our memories are formed, stored, and retrieved. But what if AI could help us crack the code on memory? How might AI be the key to unlocking problems that have evaded human cognition for so long?

Kim Stachenfeld is a Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind in NYC and Affiliate Faculty at the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia University.  Her research covers topics in Neuroscience and AI. On the Neuroscience side, she study how animals build and use models of their world that support memory and prediction. On the Machine Learning side, she works on implementing these cognitive functions in deep learning models. Kim’s work has been featured in The Atlantic, Quanta Magazine, Nautilus, and MIT Technology Review. In 2019, she was named one of MIT Tech Review’s Innovators under 35 for her work on predictive representations in hippocampus. 

In the episode, Richie and Kim explore her work on Google Gemini, the importance of customizability in AI models, the need for flexibility and adaptability in AI models, retrieval databases and how they improve AI response accuracy, AI-driven science, the importance of augmenting human capabilities with AI and the challenges associated with this goal, the intersection of AI, neuroscience and memory and much more. 

Links Mentioned in the Show:

• DeepMind
• AlphaFold
• Dr James Whittington - A unifying framework for frontal and temporal representation of memory
• Paper - Language models show human-like content effects on
• reasoning tasks
• Kim’s Website
• [Course] Artificial Intelligence (AI) Strategy
• Related Episode: Making Better Decisions using Data & AI with Cassie Kozyrkov, Google's First Chief Decision Scientist
• Sign up to RADAR: AI Edition

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