About this episode

Raia Hadsell discusses the concept of intelligence beyond language and its applications in complex systems and robotics.

Raia Hadsell, VP of Research at Google DeepMind, makes the case that intelligence is more than language: the same recipe that learns the patterns of text can learn the patterns of any complex system. She walks through DiffusionGemma and text diffusion, the Genie world models, and DeepMind's robotics stack, where world models now generate training data you cannot tell from the real thing. Recorded at RAAIS 2026. Timestamps 0:00 Introduction (Nathan Benaich) 0:35 From philosophy to DeepMind: the frontiers of intelligence 2:37 The twenty-year lesson: one recipe for complex systems 4:34 DiffusionGemma and the Gemma 4 open models 5:32 How text diffusion works 7:34 Speed, self-correction, and the sudoku test 10:51 World models: better agents need better worlds 12:56 Genie 1 to Genie 3 15:01 Genie 3 demos: typing a world into being 18:20 World models for education 19:38 Grounding Genie in Street View 20:41 Robotics: a brain and a spine 23:14 Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 and Boston Dynamics' Spot 24:42 The vision-language-action model 25:45 The data bottleneck and closing the loop 27:24 Beyond language: the domains still to crack

People in this episode

Host: Nathan Benaich

Guest: Raia Hadsell

Topics covered

• intelligence
• language
• robotics
• machine learning
• world models

Keywords

• intelligence
• language
• DeepMind
• robotics
• world models
• DiffusionGemma
• Genie

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Google DeepMind, Boston Dynamics

Books & works: DiffusionGemma, Gemma 4, Genie, Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6

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