In this episode, we sit down with Mihaela Roșca, a Research Engineer at DeepMind, one of the world’s most advanced and influential artificial intelligence research labs. DeepMind is renowned for its bold, high-impact breakthroughs—from mastering complex strategy games like Go and Starcraft, to revolutionizing protein folding with AlphaFold, and optimizing weather prediction and energy efficiency at planetary scale. It’s not just about research for its own sake—DeepMind’s work is actively shaping the future of science, technology, and society. Mihaela’s journey to DeepMind is a testament to the rigorous academic and applied excellence the organization represents. She began her career as a Software Engineer at Google Zurich, working on natural language processing using neural networks. She went on to pursue a PhD at University College London (UCL), under the mentorship of renowned machine learning professor Marc Deisenroth. Her research sits at the intersection of generative models, reinforcement learning, NLP, and the challenge of building scalable and safe machine learning systems—with a special intellectual curiosity for probability distributions and their central role in learning. Mihaela holds a first-class honours MEng in Computing from Imperial College London, where she was recognized for her academic excellence, and today she is part of a world-class team pushing the theoretical and practical limits of artificial intelligence. In this episode, we explore:
