Digital illustration of a futuristic brain connected by circuit lines inside a hexagon with a light blue background.

Academic Area

Artificial Intelligence

Understanding how intelligent systems are built, trained, evaluated, and governed.

Thinking About Thinking supports rigorous, interdisciplinary inquiry into artificial intelligence and machine learning, from foundational theory to real-world deployment.

This focus area brings together researchers, engineers, and practitioners working across artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer science, data science, robotics, and related fields. Our aim is to build shared understanding, surface open problems, and strengthen the intellectual infrastructure needed to study and shape intelligent systems responsibly.

We are particularly interested in questions that sit between disciplines: how learning systems generalize, how they interact with human institutions, how they should be evaluated, and how technical decisions shape social outcomes.

A sky with dark blue clouds.

Core Questions We Explore

How do modern learning systems generalize, reason, and fail?

What are the limits of current machine learning paradigms?

How should AI systems be evaluated, interpreted, and compared?

How do technical systems interact with human cooperation, institutions, and governance?

Recordings - Coming Soon

Presentation slide titled 'AE Global Summit Keynote' with the subtitle 'AI, cognition and society'. Featuring a photo of Prof. Chris Summerfield, Research Director & Professor at AIIS & Oxford, smiling with a blue background.

We publish recordings of talks, panels, and seminars to make serious thinking about artificial intelligence and machine learning accessible beyond the conference hall.

Presentation slide for AE Global Summit Keynote titled 'AI, cognition and society' featuring Prof. Chris Summerfield, Research Director & Professor at AISI & Oxford, with a photo of him smiling against a blue background.
Slide for AE Global Summit with titles and photos of speakers Dr. Ruairdh Battleday, Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder Thinking About Thinking, and Dr. James Whittington, Chief Scientific Officer & Co-Founder Thinking About Thinking.
Presentation slide titled 'AE Global Summit Keynote' with the subtitle 'The Neural Race Reduction: Dynamics of feature learning in deep architectures,' by Prof. Andrew Saxe, a Henry Dale Fellow and Joint Group Leader at UCL. The slide includes the logo and slogan 'Thinking About Thinking.' A grayscale photo of a smiling man with short hair is on the right side, set against a blue background.
Slide from a presentation titled 'AE Global Summit Keynote' with the subtitle 'AI & The Crossroads for Society'. The speaker's name is Dex Hunter-Torricke, a Senior Fellow at Fathom. The slide features a professional headshot of Dex Hunter-Torricke, a man with dark hair, wearing a suit, smiling, set against a blue background. The slide also includes the logo and tagline 'Thinking About Thinking'.
Slide from a presentation with the title "AE Global Summit Keynote," subtitle "Beyond Chatbots: Using AI to model the unknowns," presented by Dr. Raia Hadsell, VP of Research at DeepMind. The slide features a photo of Dr. Raia Hadsell, a woman with shoulder-length hair, glasses, and a neutral expression, against a blue background. The bottom left corner displays the logo and slogan "Thinking About Thinking."
A promotional graphic for the AE Global Summit keynote speaker Dr. Laura Gilbert. The image features a professional portrait of Dr. Gilbert with long dark hair, wearing a black top against a gradient blue background. The left side of the graphic contains white text highlighting her name, title, and talk topic, with the summit theme "Making Government more Human with AI." The logo of the Tony Blair Institute and the tagline "Thinking About Thinking" are also visible.
A presentation slide for the AE Global Summit Keynote titled 'Era of Experience' by Prof. David Silver, Principal Research Scientist at DeepMind. The slide includes a photo of Prof. Silver, a blue gradient background, and the logo with the words 'Thinking About Thinking'.
Slide from a conference titled 'AE Global Summit Keynote' featuring Prof. Csaba Szepesvari, Foundations Team Lead at DeepMind, discussing building logical, language-instructible AI systems, with a photo of him smiling and text including the conference theme 'Thinking About Thinking'.
Slide from a presentation titled "AE Global Summit" with the topic "Opening Remarks: AI x Safety" by Prof. Skyler Wang, Assistant Professor & Research Scientist at McGill & Meta. The slide includes a photo of Prof. Skyler Wang smiling against a blue gradient background and the logo "Thinking About Thinking" with a starburst design.
Slide from a presentation titled "AE Global Summit Keynote" with the subtitle "Winning in the UK's AI Start-up Ecosystem." It features Minister Kanishka Narayan, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for AI and Online Safety, wearing glasses and a suit, with the logo and slogan "Thinking About Thinking."
Presentation slide for AE Global Summit Keynote featuring Prof. Jakob Foerster, titled "Journey of Enquiry and Discovery – 10 years of AI research", with the subtitles indicating he is an Associate Professor at Oxford, alongside the event's logo and theme "Thinking About Thinking". The slide also includes a headshot of Prof. Jakob Foerster smiling with a blue background.
Presentation slide for AE Global Summit Keynote with a photo of Prof. Richard Susskind, titled 'What if AGI?' and mentioning he is the President of Society for Computers and Law, with a logo and the words 'Thinking About Thinking'.
Seminars
Seminars
View more recordings
View more recordings

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are core themes across our flagship events.

At our AE Global Summits, we convene researchers, builders, and policymakers to examine Open Problems in AI research, infrastructure, applications, and governance.

At our Conference on the Mathematics of Neuroscience and AI we explore the deeper mathematical and computational foundations of learning and intelligence, often in dialogue with neuroscience and cognitive science.

Events

A black and white photo of a conference room with chandeliers and a large audience, showing a presentation slide titled 'Neuroscience, Machine Learning, and the Mathematics of Intelligence'.
Crowd of people attending the AE Global Summit on Artificial Intelligence, Startup, and Society in a large auditorium in London, UK, November 2026.
Information about the Think About Thinking Ambassador Programme, describing its purpose, activities, and criteria for becoming a fellow, with a 'Learn more' link.

Ambassadors

Year 2025

Collage of diverse young adults with headshots in circular frames, black and white, some smiling, some serious, with one person wearing VR goggles and one raising fist, representing a professional or academic setting.

Ambassadors

Blue website banner with white text supporting intelligence and science, and a link labeled 'Donate' with an arrow.
Donate
Donate