ORGANIZATION
Paradigms of Intelligence Team
The Google research group Agüera y Arcas leads — investigating the fundamental nature of intelligence across biological, artificial, and collective systems, positioned at the frontier where machine learning meets complexity science.
The Paradigms of Intelligence team (PAIR, later PI) is the Google research group Agüera y Arcas leads as Vice President and Fellow. The team's remit is unusually broad for industrial AI research: not to build better products but to investigate the fundamental nature of intelligence itself — as it arises in biological systems, in artificial architectures, and in the collective cognitive structures that emerge from their interaction. The team sits at the intersection of machine learning research, computational neuroscience, and the complexity science tradition associated with the Santa Fe Institute.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The team's existence reflects Agüera y Arcas's conviction that the most important questions about AI are not engineering questions but scientific ones — what intelligence is, how it emerges, what architectures produce what capabilities, how biological and artificial forms of cognition relate. The framing is deliberate: paradigms (plural) of intelligence, not a single paradigm, and not artificial intelligence in isolation from natural