This article was adapted from a podcast. Listening/viewing options, as well as a full transcript, available here.

On last week's Five-Minute-Friday episode, I introduced the concept of artificial general intelligence ( or AGI, for short), a theoretical algorithm that one day could have all of the intellectual capacities of a human being. I also introduced the company DeepMind and the landmark deep reinforcement learning algorithms they developed over the past decade, each one a stepping stone on the road to creating AGI. If any of AGI, DeepMind, or deep reinforcement learning are unfamiliar terms to you, you might want to check out last week's Five Minute Friday episode to brush up.

Last week's coverage of DeepMind's deep reinforcement learning advances bring me now to MuZero, an algorithm that David Silver and his DeepMind research team published on in the final days of 2020 in the journal Nature, arguably the most prestigious academic science journal.