This event was recorded on January 14, 2026 at Aspen Center for Physics, produced by Aspen Center for Physics, in partnership with Aspen Public Radio.
Our civilization has learned how to turn sand into silicon chips, silicon chips into neural networks, and neural networks into Artificial Intelligences (AIs). Over the last half decade, the capabilities of large language model AIs (like ChatGPT and Gemini) have leapt from babbling preschoolers to International Math Olympiad gold medallists, and now beyond. This talk reviews recent progress in training AIs to do science and reasoning, and speculates as to what it will mean for the future of physics if these trends continue.
The lecture is followed by a discussion panel featuring leading artificial intelligence experts, offering multiple perspectives on the opportunities and challenges shaping AI today.
About Adam Brown
Adam Brown leads Blueshift—a research team at Google DeepMind focused on advancing the scientific and reasoning capabilities of artificial intelligence—and is a core contributor to Gemini. Before Google, he studied physics and philosophy at Oxford, earned a PhD at Columbia, and subsequently held academic appointments in the physics departments at Princeton and Stanford. There he taught Einstein’s general theory of relativity and conducted research on topics spanning the big bang, inflation, the multiverse, black holes, quantum computation, space elevators, bubbles of nothing, and the long-term fate of the universe, as well as the deep connections between physics and computer science. He joined Google in 2018.