The following is a conversation with Ariol Vanillaalus.

He's a senior research scientist at Google Deep Mind, and before that he was at Google

Brain and Berkeley.

His research has been cited over 39,000 times.

He's truly one of the most brilliant and impactful minds in the field of deep learning.

He's behind some of the biggest papers and ideas in AI, including sequence-to-sequence

learning, audio generation, image captioning, neural machine translation, and, of course,

reinforcement learning.

He's a lead researcher of the Alpha Star Project, creating an agent that defeated a top professional

at the game of Starcraft.

This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.

If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, iTunes, or simply connect with me on Twitter at

Lex Friedman, spelled F-R-I-D.

And now here's my conversation with Ariol Vanillaalus.

You spearheaded the Deep Mind team behind Alpha Star that recently beat a top professional

player at Starcraft.

So you have an incredible wealth of work and deep learning in a bunch of fields, but

let's talk about Starcraft first.

Let's go back to the very beginning, even before Alpha Star, before Deep Mind, before

Deep Learning.

First, what came first for you?

A lot for programming or a lot for video games?

...