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
