Raia Hadsell (VP of Research at Google DeepMind) RAAIS 2026

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. Timestamp: 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 --- The Research and Applied AI Summit (RAAIS) is a community for entrepreneurs and researchers who accelerate the science and applications of AI technology for the greater good. The London-based AI conference is a one-day event covering machine learning, deep learning, reinforcement learning, data science, healthcare and life sciences. RAAIS is presented by The RAAIS Foundation, a non-for-profit with a mission to education and research in AI for the common good. Past speakers have included researchers and leaders from Google DeepMind, Anthropic, ElevenLabs, Isomorphic Labs, Meta, Poolside, Black Forest Labs, Odyssey, Recursion Pharmaceuticals, Benevolent AI, Graphcore, Darktrace, Niantic, Stanford, Berkeley, Cambridge, UCL, the University of Toronto, the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, the Tony Blair Institute, The New York Times, and Bloomberg. RAAIS: https://raais.co/ The RAAIS Foundation: https://www.raais.org/ Air Street Capital (https://www.airstreet.com/) is a venture capital firm investing in AI-first companies. The State of AI Report: https://www.stateof.ai/ Air Street Press: https://press.airstreet.com/