Why Building AI At DeepMind Feels Like ‘Surfing’
TechStuff
iHeartPodcasts
4.3 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 29 April 2026
⏱️ 41 minutes
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Summary
Live from The Royal Institution of Great Britain, it's TechStuff! Oz sat down with two visionaries at an event hosted by Quilt.AI. First, he spoke with Ali Eslami, a Distinguished Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, who built the prototype for what is now AI Search. Ali talked about how working on AI can feel like surfing, and what went into connecting Gemini to Google Search to create what he called "neural Google."
After that, Oz chats with Saad Mohseni about his work with MOBY Group. Saad guides Oz through his twenty-year effort to bring top-tier news and entertainment to Afghanistan and beyond — from a reality TV singing competition that changed the country, to using WhatsApp and AI to provide education to girls banned from school.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed human. |
| 0:19.9 | Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm Osvaloshin. |
| 0:22.1 | Today, we're bringing you two conversations that I had last week at an event hosted by Quilt.AI. |
| 0:28.5 | And it was a pretty cool experience for me because the conversations took place on stage |
| 0:33.3 | at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. |
| 0:36.4 | Back in 1821, they dissected a month on the exact stage where I was speaking. |
| 0:42.3 | Fifteen scientists attached the institution of won Nobel Prizes, |
| 0:45.8 | and no less than 10 chemical elements were discovered here, including sodium and potassium. |
| 0:51.3 | So I was in ridiculously good company, |
| 0:53.7 | and I was there to interview two contemporary |
| 0:56.0 | visionaries. The first is Ali Islami. He is a distinguished research scientist at Google's deep |
| 1:01.6 | mind, who built the prototype for what is now AI search. It would be fair to say his work has changed |
| 1:08.6 | the front page of the internet. I see my role as being one of a surfer where I have to be leaning just enough into the future |
| 1:16.6 | to kind of make forward progress, but not too far that I fall into the abyss. |
| 1:21.6 | The second conversation I had was with Sard Moseini, CEO of Moby Group. |
| 1:26.6 | He created the first privately owned radio and TV stations in Afghanistan and built media networks in Iran, Iraq, Ethiopia and India. |
| 1:34.4 | And he continues to harness platform technologies like radio, TV and WhatsApp to drive culture in fascinating and powerful ways. |
| 1:44.0 | Initially, it was a bunch of students tutoring girls on WhatsApp. |
| 1:48.6 | Now we have a WhatsApp AI chatbot, and we have 250,000 kids that use it. |
| 1:53.5 | It's a bridge between a time when we have education |
| 1:56.6 | and a time when hopefully we'll have education for girls. |
... |
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