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Making a Mind

Making a Mind

Written by: Amazon AGI Lab
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What happens when brains meet code? Join cognitive scientist Dr. Danielle Perszyk as she unravels the science of intelligence, dissects the latest AI research, and explores the consequences of training autonomous systems. Breaking down concepts from AI hallucinations and reinforcement learning, to complex reasoning and relational dynamics, this podcast features conversations with researchers, scientists and industry peers about how we can build AI agents that augment human capacity. Thoughtful, insightful, and a little playful—this is for anyone curious about the minds behind the machines.

Science
Episodes
  • Building Reinforcement Learning (RL) Gyms to Shape Agent Learning with Jason Laster
    Jan 7 2026

    How do you build environments complex enough to train agents that can handle the real web? Dr. Danielle Perszyk sits down with Jason Laster, an engineer leading Amazon's AGI Lab's effort to build reinforcement learning (RL) gyms— simulated web environments where agents learn—to explore how environment development is as critical as models, data, and compute. The browser is one of the most complex worlds we could possibly train in, and this conversation unpacks why high-fidelity simulations that capture every UI quirk matter more than building thousands of basic environments. Discover how RL gyms are finally becoming practical at scale, why observability and verifiable rewards are essential for rigorous training, and why simulated environments beat the real web for developing reliable autonomous systems.

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    41 mins
  • A History of Modern Agents with Kelsey Szot
    Jan 7 2026

    How did we get from language models to AI agents that can take action? Dr. Danielle Perszyk sits down with Kelsey Szot, product lead at Amazon's AGI Lab and one of the original founders of Adept (a startup that helped pioneer modern AI agents) to discuss the technical breakthroughs that transformed AI from pattern recognition to agentic capabilities. Danielle and Kelsey trace the evolution from early distributed training at scale to today's autonomous systems that can reason, plan, and interact with real environments—exploring the shift from rigid, rules-based automation to AI that can generalize across changing interfaces and complex workflows.

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    51 mins
  • Trailer: "Making a Mind"
    Dec 10 2025
    2 mins
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