Royal Institution Christmas Lectures: The Truth About AI

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Royal Institution Christmas Lectures

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Mind-expanding talks and hands-on science, inspiring children and adults alike since 1825.

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2023: Professor Mike Wooldridge - The Truth about AI

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Mike Wooldridge

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Royal Institution Christmas Lectures: 2023: Professor Mike Wooldridge - The Truth about AI: How to Build an Intelligent Machine

How to Build an Intelligent Machine

BBC Four - Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, 2023: Professor Mike Wooldridge - The Truth about AI, How to Build an Intelligent Machine

Professor Mike Wooldridge explores the nature of artificial intelligence. 

Professor Mike Wooldridge explores the nature of artificial intelligence. By using experiments and demonstrations, he investigates how AI learns and what it can do.

Professor Mike Wooldridge asks: what is artificial intelligence? He compares how AI works and learns with how the human brain functions. 

Exploring the roots of AI, Mike reveals how Alan Turing devised the Imitation Game – a test of whether a machine answering a series of questions could pass as a human. The audience in the lecture theatre play a real-life version of the game to find out if AI can pass this test today. 

In this lecture, Mike examines real-life neurons in action and explains how artificial neural networks are inspired by neural structures in the brain. To demonstrate how AI learns, we watch drones as they are trained to recognise and fly through structures in the lecture theatre autonomously. 
 
AI exploded into the public consciousness in 2022 with the release of ChatGPT and boasts around 100 million monthly users. Mike unravels the mystery of how large language models like ChatGPT work, and he finds out if one day this technology - along with a whole suite of different AI tools - will allow us to understand the animals we share this planet with. 

The Christmas Lectures are the most prestigious event in the Royal Institution calendar, dating from 1825, when Michael Faraday founded the series. They are the world’s longest running science television series and always promise to inspire and amaze each year through explosive demonstrations and interactive experiments with the live theatre audience.

Royal Institution Christmas Lectures: 2023: Professor Mike Wooldridge - The Truth about AI

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Leading AI researcher Professor Mike Wooldridge tackles artificial intelligence.

Leading AI researcher Professor Mike Wooldridge tackles the most important and rapidly evolving field of science in the world today - artificial intelligence.

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Royal Institution Christmas Lectures

2023: Professor Mike Wooldridge - The Truth about AI

How to Build an Intelligent Machine

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