1/15) What could drive AI agents to cooperate with each other, even if there is no chance for reciprocity or pay back? 🤔 🧵 Our team at Google, Paradigms of Intelligence, uncovered new paths to cooperation and a new game theory for foundation models 👇

This week marks one year since “What Is Intelligence?” was published. It was a really fun book to write. I knew that some of the material would be dated by the time it reached readers. But I hoped that, despite rapid progress in AI, the core ideas about life and intelligence would endure. So far, so good, I think! Hearing how you have connected with the book has meant so much. Thank you for reading, and an extra big thank you to those of you who have reviewed it, recommended it, or given it to friends.

Excited to present this work @NeurIPSConf this December! Thanks again to my collaborators @fcicala @blaiseaguera @tyrell_turing @natashajaques @maxhkw @eyvindn !!!

BREAKING: Google launching TPUs in space NEXT WEEK on SpaceX falcon 9 to test AI data centers orbit ITS HAPPENING

The popular narrative of AGI often centers on a single, isolated super-intelligence. My colleagues James Manyika, @bratton, and I have a different model. In our new DeepMind Institute essay, we argue that the AGI transition will be a highly social event. bit.ly/artificial-symbiotic-…

What do we actually mean when we talk about “AGI”? Enjoyed discussing this with George Musser for his latest piece in @sciam. scientificamerican.com/artic…

Congratulations to Prof. Blake Richards on winning the 2026 Schmidt Sciences Polymaths Award🎉 With the $2.5M prize, his team will build AI models that capture the uniqueness of individual minds, potentially advancing mental health care👏 🔗Read more: reporter.mcgill.ca/blake-ric…

Félicitations au prof. Blake Richards pour avoir remporté le prix @schmidtsciences Polymaths🎉 La bourse de 2,5 M$ financera un projet d’IA visant à mieux comprendre la singularité cognitive de chacun et à faire progresser les soins en santé mentale👏 🔗reporter.mcgill.ca/blake-ric…

I’m beyond honoured to be named a 2026 @schmidtsciences Polymath. With US$2.5 million over five years, I’ll be able to pursue a highly interdisciplinary project that will combine quantitative and qualitative data to better capture human neurodiversity.🧠 schmidtsciences.org/?p=19976…

Congratulations to Blake Richards (@tyrell_turing), Core Academic Member at Mila, Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science and Montreal Neurological Institute at @McGill_VPRI and Canada @CIFAR_News AI Chair, on winning the prestigious 2026 @schmidtsciences Polymath Award! This award gives exceptional scientists the freedom to innovate and push the boundaries of scientific discovery, much like his pioneering research at the intersection of brains and algorithms. A well-deserved recognition of his remarkable journey and his bold vision for the future of AI and neuroscience! lnkd.in/gRDPtGVY

Bravo à Blake Richards (@tyrell_turing), membre académique principal à Mila, Professeur adjoint à l’Institut neurologique de Montréal et à l’École d’informatique de @McGill_VPRI et titulaire d’une chaire en IA Canada-@CIFAR, qui remporte le prestigieux prix @schmidtsciences Polymath 2026 ! Ce prix offre aux scientifiques d'exception la liberté d'innover pour faire avancer la science, à l'image de ses travaux pionniers entre cerveau et algorithmes. Une reconnaissance de son parcours remarquable et de ses ambitions pour l'avenir de l'IA et des neurosciences ! schmidtsciences.org/2026-pol…

We’re excited to share BrainWideBench, a new benchmark for evaluating how models of neural activity generalize across animals and tasks! A major bottleneck in modeling neural data today is rigorous and standardized evaluation. Modelling techniques need to be tested under multiple regimes and downstream tasks. 📄 Check out the paper here! arxiv.org/abs/2609.22064 Special shoutout to @alx_adr, who co-led this work with me and contributed equally as co-first authors!

1/3 Conscious AI and Biological Naturalism. A veeery loooong time in the making, but I'm happy to say that the full collection is now out in @BBSJournal 🔥 I deeply thank all commentators - of fifty commentaries! - for their wise, broad, and deep opinions on this critical topic. I also thank them for their saintly patience. 🙏🏽 I remain highly skeptical about the prospects for conscious AI (for silicon digital systems), but I've learned an enormous amount from the privilege of engaging with these commentaries. Hands down one of the most rewarding experiences of my professional life. My hope is that - whether you agree with me or not - having such a diversity of views collected in one place will serve a useful resource for discussions about consciousness and AI. The original target article is available here: cambridge.org/core/journals/… My response "The stuff matters: consciousness, computation, and biology" was published just now, and is here: cambridge.org/core/journals/… And the set of 50 commentaries are collected here: cambridge.org/core/journals/… Unfortunately these are not open access. I will try to remedy that, at least for the target & response. FWIW there's a more accessible version of my view on the topic here in @NoemaMag noemamag.com/the-mythology-o… and also a short @TEDTalks from earlier this year ted.com/talks/anil_seth_why_…

A beautiful demonstration of symbiogenesis in action in the world of artificial life from one of our student researchers in Pi, @kjha02. Evolving agents on a shared memory tape, he and his co-authors show that when compute is a budgeted resource, cooperation emerges organically. Parasitic behavior simply exhausts the energy required to copy code and replicate. Read the preprint here: arxiv.org/abs/2609.10817

Can self-interested, self-improving, self-replicating agents learn to cooperate? Our new paper, Tapes Together Strong, shows they can: when social behavior, computation, and reproduction share one energy budget, cooperation evolves from scratch. arxiv.org/abs/2609.10817 🧵

exciting work led by our student researcher @kjha02. we explore how cooperation emerges in a "computational primordial soup" with emergent+endogenous self replication. crucial for scaling such envs towards intelligence, mirroring nature's path to e.g. multicellularity & societies

A new artificial life paper our from our Paradigms of Intelligence team! 🙂 This one explores the evolution of cooperation. 🧬

Check out our new paper from the Paradigms of Intelligence team. We show how you can modify a denoising model to get a system where continuing to roll-out the recurrent hidden state leads to consistent gains in reasoning problems.

1/7) What happens when we add a persistent memory state and remove timestep conditioning from a denoising model? We obtain an anytime iterative solver! With less than 250k-params, we obtain a 99.9% accuracy on Sudoku-Extreme and 98.3% on Maze-Unique. arxiv.org/abs/2609.01449

Sure would be a tragedy if there were a frontier AI lab out there that was already making Nobel-level contributions to life sciences but was forced by management to pivot away from basic research towards LLM products.