Murray Shanahan
Also known as Murray Patrick Shanahan
Murray Shanahan is an artificial intelligence researcher at Imperial College London and Google DeepMind, and his work ranges from hybrid symbolic-neural systems to large language models. In 1984 he graduated from Imperial with a First in computer science, and he completed a PhD at Cambridge in 1988. He published Embodiment and the Inner Life in 2010 and The Technological Singularity in 2015, and in 2017 he joined DeepMind while keeping a part-time professorship at Imperial. In 2023 he co-wrote a Nature paper on role play in large language models. He is a principal scientist at Google DeepMind and an emeritus professor of artificial intelligence at Imperial College London.
- Now at
- Imperial College London and Google DeepMind
- Works
- 237
- Citations
- 9,499
- h-index
- 48
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 15 October 2026.
Timeline
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1984–1988
A first, then a Cambridge PhD
In 1984 he graduates from Imperial with a First in computer science. A PhD at King's College, Cambridge, follows in 1988.
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1987–1995
Research posts at Imperial
From 1987 to 1991 he works as a postdoctoral researcher in Imperial's Department of Computing, and from 1991 to 1995 as an EPSRC advanced research fellow there.
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2010–2015
Books on minds and machines
His book Embodiment and the Inner Life appears from Oxford University Press in 2010, and The Technological Singularity follows from MIT Press in 2015. The first book is a significant influence on the 2014 film Ex Machina, for which he is a scientific advisor.
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2016
Deep symbolic reinforcement learning
Together with colleagues, he publishes a proof-of-concept for Deep Symbolic Reinforcement Learning in 2016, a hybrid architecture that combines symbolic AI with neural networks.
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2017
Joining Google DeepMind
He joins DeepMind in 2017, keeping the Imperial professorship he received in 2006 on a part-time basis.
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2023
Role play with large language models
Nature publishes Role play with large language models in 2023, a paper he co-writes. The paper casts dialogue-agent behaviour as role play, which draws on familiar folk psychological terms.
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2024
Talking about language models
Communications of the ACM publishes his Talking about Large Language Models in 2024. The paper advocates repeatedly stepping back to remind ourselves of how LLMs actually work.
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As of October 2026
Principal scientist at DeepMind
Currently he is a principal scientist at Google DeepMind and an emeritus professor of artificial intelligence at Imperial College London.
Sources and credits
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