Looks cool, but it's very hard to get me excited about yet another proprietary model for which absolutely zero technical details are released (not even the number of parameters), which is safetymaxxed to the limit, and whose usage quota will (most likely) be so limited that it'll be effectively useless for anyone who doesn't work at Google or doesn't have infinite money.
The prompts build impressive clips.
I am more interested in how to make consistent "participants" and "environment" with multiple clips so they look like one longer clip.
In the clip with a marble bust dropped on a watermelon, at this point https://imgur.com/a/IHLnkUs the bust should've toppled over, if the physics were properly modeled.
They were demonstrating steering.
That's the thing about machine learning over time, and the big hole in the whole world model idea. Time and time again we make simulations and train models and we think that will work. It never does.
And why not? Because the first model that can actually learn to handle the simulation not only can do the simulation internally too, but it can do it better than out simulation.
So we get to a point and people keep making complicated simulations of one kind or another ... and then someone who's never used the simulation, and doesn't need it for model training gets by far the highest score on every benchmark and everyone agrees the simulation was kind of beside the point.
Reminds me of a post[1] by Sam Altman in 2024:
> movies are going to become video games and video games are going to become something unimaginably better
Sometimes I really wanna skip 10 years into the future and see where all this eventually leads.
> Sometimes I really wanna skip 10 years into the future and see where all this eventually leads.
Sounds glib, but honestly ... more Ads :/
Why not do heroin today?
> movies are going to become video games and video games are going to become something unimaginably better
This is the kind of detached from reality, devoid of humanity statement only a tech bro could come up with.
It boggles the mind how these people can be so dumb. He literally does not understand why people enjoy movies.
Why wait? It's become very clear already: https://kotaku.com/the-proliferation-of-copycats-on-steam-ma...
Instead of better it's become unimaginably worse since games can no longer serve as a means of self expression because the second you express anything worthwhile 100 people copy it immediately ... without you. It's like Disney (whose whole business model is copying public domain stories and music and ... but taking out the source and everyone who ever had anything to do with it). Except there's no longer one highly selective company destroying the world's culture one piece at a time, but 10000000 idiots looking to make a quick buck, destroying culture and self-expression like a fire raging in the rainforest.
With Anthropic going public, I expect a lot of model releases from the competition signalling to the market. "We are still around, please leave some money for us too"
That stained glass landscape video is pretty cool. I wonder if it would be possible to implement that effect in a real-time game engine.
Gotta love the kraken destroying the city in the background of the Hong Kong lovers motorcycle scene despite nothing in the prompt about monsters. Filmmakers are still safe.
It prompts "gigantic alien tentacles that destroy the world."
I suspect you're reading the base prompt, but the video also demonstrates adding further prompts to change what is happening as the scene progresses.
In the man walking through the dressing room scene, the camera starts behind the man. And you can see that the left half of his body is wearing a grey suit... but the right half is wearing a grey dress. :O
> Genie 4 is natively multimodal, enabling audio-like music, ambient noises, and interactive dialogue
What on Earth is audio-like music? Do they mean music-like audio?
Audio like: music, ambient-noises etc
As opposed to video-like music...
That was probably meant to be an em-dash, or have spaces around the hyphen.
probably meant "audio like music, ambient noises, and interactive dialogue."
A big chunk of the right side of castle disappeared, including catapult, when camera turned back while flying on dragon. See 1:25 to 1:29. I was not expecting this to happen in a "world model".
I was under the impression he has already fly past the catapult.
guys they are building digital cages so they can rob you blind while you are in your nice digital world, sorry we will ignore this stuff into oblivion
The playable element is cool PR but the news is that endless synthetic training data for embodied AI models is basically here or close.
I highly suspect that Genie is being made primarily for internal use, and access is more to gather feedback/training data and a bit of PR.
Amazing!
Question I have is when will they be able to render something more then 30 seconds.
And how much will it cost? There has to be a HUGE amount of computing power behind this. As a video game developer I live in fear and anticipation.
What is the point of this vs cheap robotic arm simulations?
The only place I see this applicable is for visual artists prototyping
You could produce a thousand cheap ads for your product or one expensive real ad.
You could produce immersive VR content specified only by prompts and in which any action is possible.
Wish fulfilment gets extremely boring, extremely fast.
Video games are interesting because of very specific constraints the developers impose on the player.
Every increment of advance in this field is an increment of evidence that we are simulations.
No it doesn't, not even close. You are looking at a video represented as pixels changing on a flat screen. None of it actually exists. You exist, the computer or phone in front of you is composed of mass and energy. None of it is algorithmic.
How does that argument work? I've seen more than a few advances, yet I don't see how any of it provides evidence that we are simulations. This might be one of those things that comes down to the definition of "simulation" I guess.
Not sure if you're joking, but the only such evidence I could think of would be something like finding some way to influence the hardware of our simulation and seeing a glitch in our world
[flagged]
Google aren't the only ones with this tech. You can try out a 24/7 rolling set of video feeds for yourself at https://fal.live
An LLM generates four alternative prompts for what could happen next and there's a real time vote running for each option. It's trippy, like watching someone's dream.
The third video is proof that v4 can, ekhm, walk slower?
Neuralink integration and I'm out of here.
Infinite Tsukuyomi is coming soon…
Surprised that "do you really think we're going to make it?" scene made the cut of the first video, her expression and tone is totally out of sync with the scene and demonstrates the problem with almost every AI gen video I've come across when it comes to capturing humanity.
The painting->interactive scene looks astonishing though
I don't know if I'm missing the point, but Genie 4 almost looks worse than Genie 3 in terms of player control? It doesn't even seem to respond to inputs, it just looks like they took some AI generated videos and put the key widgets on top.
I wonder if that's because the target audience is people directing/producing (commercial) videos, rather than games.
another POV is, what even are these experiences? whom are they for? it would take Google 10 minutes to hire all the best game developers for Android, and cost them like $2m, which is peanuts, and give them fancy Google Research titles. but instead, they're trying to get 100 google PMs, who don't give their kids screentime and who don't play any games the objective of making a product for Bart Simpsons. like these people don't realize that being good parents disqualifies them from making immersive first person shooter, "narrative" experiences.
> what even are these experiences? whom are they for?
One possible use for these is to facilitate lab -> this -> real world for robot models. Basically better than lab / algorithmically designed environments and cheaper / easier to train on than real life. Something that "looks" like real life and can scale, to apply RL for robotics to.
The more parsimonious explanation is that 100 PMs are even less qualified to make surgical robots, but at least they can download a video game and play it for 5 minutes. There's a great scene in You Can See Everything where Billy Evans is watching bio presentations on 1.5x speed, which obviously, makes him look like a huge moron - "knowing enough" bio is very bearish.
Anyway, let's take your theory to its logical conclusion: the product development between real and simulated soft tissue behavior is much bigger than Exponential Time being a hypothesis and being proven. There isn't some effective acceleraltruist path here. Dario Amodei was a biotech dropout. The thing you are betting on which Google is not doing anyway, maybe they will destroy the descriptive single cell sequencing paper mill, but they're not going to be able to simulate the fat inside a BMI 30 abuela undergoing a gallbladder removal.
When Google's epitaph is eventually written, PMs will figure prominently as the catalyst for the rapidly accelerating decline.
Just as JPod by Douglas Coupland predicted.
Why hire crew or actors when you could have them be fully AI? Why film a commercial with fluffed, oil dusted, well-lit hamburgers when you could fully render something? Why actually have a vehicle capable of off-roading when you could just AI-render what it looks like off-roading (or vertically taking off, for eg)?
It's a dystopian business use case that I hope will get obliterated in the near future as the generations that believe in this stuff and are fascinated by it age out of the population.
The point is simulation for autonomous vehicles and robots.
It's hard for me to understand Google's redefinition of "world models" (basically: a txt2videogame modality for LLMs) as anything other than an attempt to bury Yann Lecun's definition of "world models", which includes an implicit bear case against LLMs and thus Google's stock price.
Is anyone actually making any games with these tools? Like, can I play one on Steam or something?
>coming soon to Google AI Ultra subscribers in Project Genie
Would be fun to muck around with world models. Are there any that I can try for under £200 p/m without being part of a special project?
> "A REAL, ultra-photorealistic, high-end 35mm cinematic first-person perspective..."
Real nice prompting there, Google. It also still looks like a video game rendering.
ironically, the word "realistic" appears next to game footage, not next to real one.
Not ironic at all. You describe a rendered image as photorealistic, you just call a photo a photo.
That's the irony. The over prompting ends up doing the opposite thing it is intended to do.
Prompt: make a press release that isn't a slideshow on this company's own browser and hardware platform.
Who'd be down to write a science fiction novel where creating fake images is a crime and not a product?
I guess we'll find out when they publish it.
Showing off an anglo-bias with the Japanese train station in the 1980s, with a man speaking english.
why does this need to exist?
So world models capture inherent complexity of physical reality to help teach AI about hidden laws which probably helps train both LLMs and multimodal models used for autonomous vehicles and robots? And AMD acquiring World Labs is a move to outdo Nvidia’s work in this space. And Google probably sees this as a gateway to a new platform of autonomous vehicles and humanoids that they could rent out as a CSP? Competing with Nvidia, Tesla and complementing Waymo. Am I getting that right?
Hmm, wonder if Databricks trademarked their Genie AI product.
So does this export 3d assets or an Unreal/godot/unity project so it can be turne dinto a game or is it limited to their runtime?
this is the gta6 I am was hoping for
What is this for? I cannot understand these models. They are very much polluting the internet with nonsense and use capacity that people and businesses need for actual work.
If these are the cause of why I have to pay 2-4x I used to for a computer, then Google should go fuck themselves.
From the auto-generated captions on the YouTube video on this page.
> Genie form [sic] can simulate scenarios
It's kind of amazing: the juxtaposition of such advanced generative AI and such terrible speech-to-text coming from the same parent company.
The volume of content on YouTube is enormous, I’m kind of surprised they offer auto captions at all given that they have little to no competition in the space.
Is it surprising? Indexing for search is the backbone of Google's business model.
It's why if you search a practical task you will often see results link to specific parts of a video.
Ok but like, surely the Deepmind team could sneeze and get flawless captions for this video. Why rely on the default YouTube captions instead of just attaching correct ones? It seems silly.
Typos mean the text came from a human.
They're not proof-reading the blog posts either. The second sentence:
> Genie 4 is natively multimodal, enabling audio-like music, ambient noises, and interactive dialogue to be simultaneously generated with the world.
(Emphasis mine). Like, yeah, I'd sure hope the music is similar to audio.
I wonder if this was a de-LLMese pass gone wrong, and the original was "enabling audio -- like music, ambient noises, and interactive dialogue -- to be simultaneously generated with the world.
When you're high on vibes, the line between music and audio-like music tends to blur.
These days, unproofread text adds authenticity.
[dead]
As I said before, World models will become simulation engines of AAA games where there is no need to release the actual game artifact and even if the game exists as a binary artifact, it will never be released and will be available on their hosted cloud back-end, then simulated and streamed back to you.
So, Stadia + World Models = New generation of DRM for games.
Why? Why would a non-deterministic engine be better for a game when it can be instead structured and made deterministic and then more effectively distributed to consumer hardware?
It wouldn't be better for players. It would be better for companies because the user no longer owns the computer that runs the game.
You can still stream a deterministic world to the player.
And a month or so of development time. Pure IP re-selling.
October? Yeah, just release the "Spiderman saves Halloween" prompt.
This is a wet dream for big studios.
it's not, it just sounds cooler to say prophetic things like this these days
Game industry is still struggling to find a way to incorporate regular LLMs without suffering catastrophic edge cases. A long way to go before these can do more than fancy tech demo, I think.
Because it wasn’t bad enough to need a $5000 5090 to play a game, now you’re going to need a full rack of them!
They can try, my household won't be purchasing those.
We'll be riding the huge wave of indie titles that are incoming.
> We'll be riding the huge wave of indie titles that are incoming.
The problem will be separating the wheat (people with good stories and concepts enabled by Ai) from the chaff (people with no taste slopping out trash with Ai)
Isn't that what streamers are for?
I mean - reviewers!
Because stadia was a real banger right?
Do you have even the slightest idea of the level of expectation that even the most casual gamer has?
This isn’t achieving much beyond prototyping. They’re burning so much money for no reason.
And? Just spin up some open world model and pay for the compute and play your own games?
There are so many options for games now that just sticking with the biggest AAA companies seems like a waste.
Stadia is dead, the reason is playing games over the internet sucks, input lag and serious graphics degradation - this is why I cancelled
Ai generated games suck even more, no skill; no taste, there is no TLC put into them
Then there is the economics of it, cost prohibitive to (re)generate a scene and ship that over internet pipes
Stadia is dead because if you have a data-center of GPUs you are using them for AI. It has nothing to do with input lag and graphics degradation.
Oh no my guy, you are misremembering, stadia died a quiet death long before AI.
The latency was no good even on fast internet for even slow games. It is and was pointless.
Stadia was pretty good, be it OnLive was similar quality in like 2010. It even had the best version of Cyberpunk 2077 when that launched. But the model was free version of the service for a limited resolution AND you have to buy games there OR a subscription based option and you still have to buy games there.
That made no sense and wasn't a viable business model.
stadia died way beforehand, history is useful
https://www.denofgeek.com/games/why-google-stadia-failed-shu...
I disagree, dropping below 60 FPS will be noticed and turn players away, you are not getting that with good input handling even today, it has nothing to do with GPUs and everything to do with networking
> beforehand...
is about the craze, the ChatGPT moment and beyond, when GPUs demand went exponential, not when various types of Ai algorithms were available
[dead]
And nobody will play that trash, and the world won't change.
Also, lmao, they're already trying to nickel and dime you and sell you microtransactions that took 5 minutes to make for 10 bucks. If you think they're going to pay the costs for running a world model for every single person, lol.
Y tho?
Who is asking for this? Do advertisers really want this? I feel dread about many of the AI products being sold. They're mostly tools to help funnel money from the users to the bosses.
> "which is safetymaxxed to the limit,"
I feel refusal'd just *looking* at this page.
What an insane set of requirements for a frontier technology and your excitement by it.
i think he's bummed out that a cool thing has shipped but: 1. he doesn't get any information about how it works 2. he doesn't get to use it
sure, it's still a cool accomplishment but i can understand being a little bit frustrated / not as excited for such an announcement.
Most cutting edge technologies through history have been 1) somewhat opaque and 2) narrow/exclusive in their deployment. Historically speaking, that's virtually synonymous with "cutting edge technology".
The future is coming by appointment only.
You must have a very narrow conception of sanity.
No it’s not insane.
Yawn - another closed world model.
Only open weights matter.
We should distill everything else we can into open weights.
These are exciting for robotics and industrial perhaps, but they have no consumer use case until the lid is blown off and consumers can do whatever they want with them.
So much societal progress is behind held up because the leading labs want to keep a stranglehold on the tech. Imagine if every PhD or hacker had access to the raw weights.
The general history of new technologies is that they're available for a narrow set of circumstances and then they proliferate. Can't believe that needs to be said on "hackernews"
I mean this doesn't seem very insane? Basic info about the model, the ability to actually use it. Google in particular is awful about getting access to their models from the UX side: I don't even bother trying them out unless it's via openrouter.
Yeah, I want that too, including the weights and training material. But I am still exited by what one could potentially do with it, by looking at the prompts and generated videos, even if it is cherry picked.