The case for intelligence beyond language

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.Timestamps0:00 Introduction (Nathan Benaich)0:35 From philosophy to DeepMind: the frontiers of intelligence2:37 The twenty-year lesson: one recipe for complex systems4:34 DiffusionGemma and the Gemma 4 open models5:32 How text diffusion works7:34 Speed, self-correction, and the sudoku test10:51 World models: better agents need better worlds12:56 Genie 1 to Genie 315:01 Genie 3 demos: typing a world into being18:20 World models for education19:38 Grounding Genie in Street View20:41 Robotics: a brain and a spine23:14 Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 and Boston Dynamics' Spot24:42 The vision-language-action model25:45 The data bottleneck and closing the loop27:24 Beyond language: the domains still to crack