Beyond Brute Force: The Era of Adaptive Intelligence

Sara Hooker gives her talk, “Beyond Brute Force: The Era of Adaptive Intelligence,” on September 2, 2026.

EECS Colloquium

Wednesday, September 2, 2026

Banatao Auditorium – 310 Sutardja Dai Hall
4:00 – 5:00 pm

Sara Hooker

Co-founder and CEO, Adaption Labs

Bio

Sara Hooker is a co-founder of Adaption Labs, which builds intelligence that continuously evolves. Sara leads a large team of AI researchers and engineers that build extremely efficient, adaptable systems. Sara Hooker was previously VP of Research at Cohere, and prior to Cohere, she built large systems in computer vision and NLP at Google DeepMind. Her research has been published in top venues including Nature, NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, ICLR, EMNLP, MLSys, and has been recognized with honors such as the ACL Best Paper Award and CACM front cover for her work on the Hardware Lottery. Her work has been featured in mainstream news outlets including TechCrunch, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Axios, MIT Technology, and The Atlantic.

Abstract

The next generation of truly intelligent systems won’t be defined by scale. They’ll be defined by adaption: the ability to continuously learn, evolve, and close the gap between what a model knows and what the world actually looks like right now.

In this talk, Sara Hooker, Co-founder of Adaption, defines the paradigm shift of moving beyond monolithic, static AI and what it takes to build systems that are malleable by design. She’ll cover the principles behind continual, gradient-free learning, and why the next era of intelligence evolves with the world. Her goal is to build AI that works for people, not the other way around.