Carolina Parada: Embodied AI, Gemini Robotics, Delightful Surprise | Turn the Lens Ep44

Carolina Parada and the team have delivered Gemini Robotics, Google DeepMind's vision-language-action (VLA) foundation model. Gemini Robotics provides the general-purpose 'understanding' enabling robots to go from pixel to action. How do you teach a machine to understand the physical world well enough to move through it, manipulate it, and help people in it, when every case is a corner case, never experienced in training? Embodied AI. AI with arms and legs and the ability to interact with the real world. Gemini Robotics is designed to generalize across platforms, so it works for robots that walk, roll, fly, and swim, with any end-effector, be it a hand, gripper, pincher, or suction cup. Gemini Robotics is designed to generalize across tasks and skills to respond to just about any request that the robot receives. I sat down with Carolina to explore Google DeepMind's approach to embodied AI at the Humanoids Summit 2025, hosted and organized by ALM Ventures at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Carolina has been working on teaching machines to recognize and respond to the environment in more human-centric ways, starting with speech and voice, then computer vision, and now robotics. At the heart of her work is Gemini Robotics, a foundation model that takes the multimodal reasoning capabilities of Gemini and extends them into the physical world. It's a VLA, vision-language-action, model. Going beyond "how many cars are in this image?" to "dunk the ball" when playing with a basketball toy. Embodiment-agnostic, it can adapt to control any robot: manipulators, mobile platforms, and the quickly developing humanoids. Data, Constitutional AI, teleoperation, video training, good candidates for the top concepts covered. But what impressed me more was her description of bringing new people in to experience the robots, inevitably asking the robots to do things they've never heard before, or interacting in Japanese or another language, only to have the robot respond appropriately, creating 'delight, surprise, and joy.' That is a robot future I can get excited about. Please join me in welcoming Carolina Parada to Turn the Lens, in collaboration with Humanoids Summit and ALM Ventures. This interview is a collaboration between Turn the Lens and Humanoids Summit, and was conducted at the Humanoids Summit SV, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California, December 12, 2025. Humanoids Summit is organized and hosted by ALM Ventures  Carolina Parada: Embodied AI, Gemini Robotics, Delightful Surprise | Turn the Lens with Jeff Frick Ep 44 Learn more about Humanoids Summit at http://www.humanoidssummit.com YouTube https://youtu.be/BUH1CysZX6A Trancripit and Show Notes