Uploaded January 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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Can LLMs lead us to AGI? Discussing the most promising path to AI progress and AGI with a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. We talk about reasoning, data, compute, architecture, and other factors to better understand the current trends in AI research.

This time BuzzRobot spoke with Danijar Hafner, Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, about his research and findings in AI World Models, AI Temporal Abstraction, and AI Scalable Objectives.

Predictive models paper: danijar.com/project/dreamer4
Breaking long-term task into subgoals paper: danijar.com/project/director
Designing objectives for AI to self-improve beyond human input paper: danijar.com/project/apd

Find more works by Danijar Hafner here: danijar.com

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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
01:03 Best AGI strategies
07:37 Continual learning
11:23 Dreamer
13:04 Nested learning
19:02 Objective functions
22:38 Embodiment in training
24:55 Scaling world models
29:27 Transferring knowledge to robotics
31:56 Pre-training vs. reinforcement learning
36:57 Future direction for AI