DeepMind researcher says robot intelligence is still at GPT-2 level
A field lead's yardstick: locomotion is no longer the bottleneck, cross-embodiment generalization is — useful for reading humanoid robot news.
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Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, research lead for Gemini Robotics at Google DeepMind, said on the October 3 episode of the Cognitive Revolution podcast that robot intelligence still sits at GPT-2 level on a 1-to-6 "how many GPTs" scale.
Per the notes published on the episode page, she locates the bottleneck not in instruction-following but in cross-embodiment — a policy that works on only one robot body is not yet a generic brain. She also separates two curves: locomotion trains well in simulation, while sim-to-real still breaks down on manipulation tasks like cloth and friction.
The episode notes are AI-generated summaries, not a verbatim transcript; the audio remains the authoritative record.