For several of these examples the details change if something goes out of frame and returns. A second castle is added in the dragon one. The people walking away from the camera change in the train platform one. The Hong Kong moped rider doesn't have a helmet and then he has one.
It's very good at maintaining consistency for things that stay in frame, but I don't know that this points to it developing a strong "world simulation" like they claim.
It's like its simulation model is confined to the renderable area. At the cost of increased computation, it would not be hard to generalize the technique to rendering a sphere centered around the POV to keep some of those artifacts at bay; however, the fundamental limitation of "object permanence" remains if objects can evolve chaotically as soon as they are blocked from view by another object. For that to be made stable, you really need a whole 3D model of the scene, and the cost increase there might be huge.
> While it can maintain coherent environments over short sessions, visual details and object permanence can still shift or drift over time—especially as a simulation runs longer, after multiple complex prompt edits, or when navigating throughout the scene. Complex physical interactions, real-time audio accuracy, rendering legible text, spatial accuracy, and long-term consistency are active areas of ongoing research.
If it was actually not hard, they would have made their demo with it. I don't know the technical details, but I expect a product reveal like this to show the thing at its absolute best.
I am not sure you need something so complex. If objects on scene could be tagged with their location, and the camera movement tracked to identify when it brings the same objects back into scene, then the model can use its positional information to validate if the next rendered scene contains all the objects that should be expected.
Though, I am not sure well this retains temporal stability. I am just thinking about how in 3D rendering, objects are tracked as individual things and only culled, but all the data about them still exists.
Maybe the models need to reason as a 3D space first, then turn chosen objects into renderings?
> For that to be made stable, you really need a whole 3D model of the scene, and the cost increase there might be huge.
I suspect it is, because the 2D -> 3D models I've seen are terrible, but more importantly the 2D -> 3d models are terrible. Noteworthy because I suspect the number of people who have 3D scans laying around is tiny.
What you're describing is vaguely how video games work, to my understanding. There may be interesting parallels if that becomes a technique (like how distant objects are sometimes still rendered, but at a lower resolution/polygon count).
> fundamental limitation of "object permanence" remains if objects can evolve chaotically as soon as they are blocked from view by another object.
they got this working decently well for video over a year ago, maybe closer to two years ago at this point, time goes fast. so i assume it'll translate to progress in Genie too
I don’t understand why these world models aren’t designed to be backed by an updatable world state. It could probably just lay out the world onetime and reference it as needed vs trying to invent from wholecloth via diffusion. Object persistence!
> It's very good at maintaining consistency for things that stay in frame
I noticed several inconsistencies in things that stayed in frame. See the wall on the bridge in the Van Gogh example as they walk past it to see the other side.
I bet it's configurable and just a matter of how much resource you want to allocate. If it's truly a world model then it seems to me that it's precise benefit is that it can keep track and order in things and they just choose to accept some noise/chaos/randomness/? for the demos when things move out frame? Does that sound sensible? I'm just guessing but don't feel it's a hard limit.
It looks like they had a hard time with the magic wand, peacock-to-cat example. Despite using a very long prompt that repeatedly stresses that the video should look photorealistic and NOT like a video game, the output video looks like a video game. The model is clearly capable of generating photorealistic humans and animals, so I wonder why it struggled to do so with that particular prompt.
When people talk about "photorealism" it's to describe something not real (like video game graphics and artwork) that looks almost like a real photo/video. So you don't say that a real photo is photorealistic, and if you use that word when prompting models you end up making it not realistic.
I have no idea if that's the case, but it would be funny if it didn't support negative prompting and they got someone to write the prompt who wasn't aware of that.
Edit: Okay, I read the prompts and they use negative phrasing a lot, so I guess it does work, but boy, are these prompts laborious. Requirements are repeated ad nauseam. This model seems to be quite tone deaf.
Is it surprising? Looking at the demo videos I can absolutely see why it didn't get as much attention. Not that it's not impressive, it is, but these are in different leagues.
> movies are going to become video games and video games are going to become something unimaginably better
God what an annoying thing to say. Suggesting that movies will essentially become games, or that future video games will be unimaginably better (presumably because they are driven by generative world models) betrays such a surface level appreciation for what makes art and culture and all this humanity so beautiful as it is.
The entire point of movies is the deliberate choices of the filmmakers! Movies will not be improved by our ability to choose what the main character looks like or add a style filter. Super Mario 64 is great because it is an expression of the very hardware that constrains it. Inevitable future versions where anything can happen because someone hooked the ROM up to a generative world model won't be better for it.
I agree that this technology is absolutely world changing, and am cautiously eager to see what comes of it, but it just bums me out, perhaps needlessly, that the people at the helm can be so artless, unreflective. Whatever.
yeah some friends of mine in game dev are a bit doom and gloom about all this and I need to keep reminding them that the hard work is making the million decisions that communicate the vision, the code/assets were never really what people were buying your game for.
Even assuming an AI could do literally every technical part of game dev someone (for now) needs to sit there and go "nah this part doesn't feel right" and "that boss 2nd phase opener attack is too long" etc.
until AI can also answer those questions and intuit what is good and bad taste there's still stuff for game devs to do.
"minecraft in skyrim" is cool for about 10 seconds till you think about actually sitting down to play it.
Sam had OpenAI start the Ghibli style image-gen (movies that are specifically loved for their artisanal quality). The man has patternly failed to read the room around culture.
> I agree that this technology is absolutely world changing, and am cautiously eager to see what comes of it, but it just bums me out, perhaps needlessly, that the people at the helm can be so artless, unreflective. Whatever.
This is something your average person can play around with. The filmmakers have been fumbling the ball a lot lately (not all the time, though) and I can't wait to see what rises out of the average populous. Lots of crap expected, for sure, but there will be gems in there that I'm willing to bet will blow away what we've seen in the industry. Kind of how indie game companies are eating AAA's lunch lately.
Make something beautiful, with or without the new tech. You and the rest of us will be better for it. And the investors are damn desperate for something to really resonate with the people who experience it.
We've been living in a world of videogame-like FX movie slop for at least 20 years now, without the help of AI. Try to find insightful reflection of humanity and truth in a Marvel movie... God help you. It's as boring as, well, watching someone else play a video game.
It turns out, some people like that. A lot of people like it, presumably because it's fast and stimulating, and everyone's a sucker for wowing FX even as movie FX have gotten worse and more or less converged with video games.
What's lacking in these movies isn't so much plot, it's character and thoughtfulness. They tell us nothing about ourselves.
From an art history class, long ago, I remember the explanation of how classical Greek culture degraded into depictions if "pathos", visible in changes in the sculpture, and how that heralded more or less the decline of the civilization. It seems obvious to me that we've undergone a similar transition. And the thing is, it's not the technology itself, which could be used to produce meaningful art. It's the lack of thought on the part of the creators and the audience.
I understand but I wouldn't dismiss how consumer choices already contribute to this
Younger people I know, and market to sometimes, literally avoid "plot based media" in favor of brainrot. Akin to what my generation used to call "sooo random"
People catering to it earn a lot. They don't identify as directors, but they are. They don't identify as artists either. They identify as influencers and brands.
You will never be the generation they engage with. I don't expect to base any of my choices in following trends looking for opportunities to be contingent on your affinity for movies and first/third person games.
Even when it comes to spending, they are a powerhouse because parents nationwide and worldwide give them their weekly allowances in platform credits, with no further accountability on how it's spent. There is a large audience already, trends that are full economies within a few months instead of needing to wait an entire 12 to 20 year generation for the audience to have independent purchasing power.
That's what is happening and why someone with even greater perception than me would say things that seem out of touch, but are closer to reality than you'd realize.
The Orville show explores this idea, before LLMs became a thing. Simulators become the replacement for movies, but the simulations are still designed by a person (or alien).
The concept feels more like a video game than a movie in the show, but presumably you could program the simulation to happen around you instead of you moving through it.
Do you think that Super Mario Odyssey is better than Super Mario Bros for the NES? Is Breath of the Wild better than the Legend of Zelda? I mean -- take off your nostalgia-covered glasses and imagine if you handed them both to a kid who had seen neither which one they might be more interested in. Why do you think that is?
Some movies and some games (or parts of games) really are just for fun. Eg a lot of Bethesda games would improve if you could do a randomly generated storyline on your 4th playthrough, and WoW has 0 storyline to their dailies. It could be kind of fun like a fortune cookie to get a random story. I don't expect art, but it'd be funny to see if it made up a meme-able story.
An awful lot of mainstream movies do have fairly trite plots, with a predictable film style. That's not entirely hate, sometimes I really want to see Michael Bay blow up half of LA. I don't think the next Fast and Furious movie would suffer horribly from AI writing, it's never really been an "art" kind of series anyways.
And they will be so severely targeted to you that you won't be able to identify that they are designed to influence your purchasing or voting decisions. And they will be of production quality rivaling the highest budget films - rendered on your own hardware.
Sounds like the plot from the movie matrix. Only difference between the movie and our real timeline - the ai didn't need to enslave humans, we willingly chose enslavement by ai for ourselves by continuing our google subscription.
People already do this in many video games. The simulation isn't perfect, and maybe there's a tipping point where the simulation becomes real enough that it (maybe) supplants "reality". In a sense, this is disintermediation: instead of actually riding horse, I can ride a virtual dragon. Does that make it worse, or problematic? Again, we already have this, for driving race cars, fighting in wars, etc. etc. It's just a matter of fidelity and immersion?
Also, does anyone want movies to become games? I don't. I want movies to be movies. Good movies. With interesting stories, beautiful artistic cinematography, great characters, moving paintings as Lynch said it.
For me, this does nothing. I am attracted to film and gaming for the artistry and deliberate choices made by the authors. A synthetic approach may be stimulating but I find it ultimately void.
Like, movies sometimes have alternate endings. What if they were more choice driven, and replayable. Video games have remarkably dumb ideas that keep persisting, like you can encapsulate all that is “Health” as an integer. Instead games can be an aggregation of entity bound micro-simulation that create emergent scenarios, yet follow the laws of narrative collectively. Games that build themselves. Worlds within worlds kinda jazz.
We’ve seen a lot of changes since 2016 including the rise of short form video, podcasts, audiobooks, music streaming, substack, even vinyl is up 3x (!)
With VR coming and then going technology has shown itself to hold within it no more immersive capability than a good book. It is not about rendering firepower it is about hitting the right notes.
Llms wont be able to create good games. Consider for a sec that there's like 500 "Great" games ever made, maybe more but not much, in some genres that number is less than 10. There is no training data, and its largely a matter of taste and culture that cant be represented/distilled into vector embeddings.
While i generally agree, some of this tech could be a major force multiplier and lower the barriers to entry.
Even if you have a great game idea, it takes a ton of time and money to even get it off the ground, let alone get it coded correctly and maybe get the reach you want. A LOT of flash in the pan ideas probably fizzled out faster than they needed (most recently Among Us and Fall Guys come to mind) because they were built to ship, not to easily modify.
Tech like this could lower the barrier to smaller and more creative teams or even individuals and get some better competition in the area. Fighting games KNEW that rollback was the way looooooong before AAA bit the bullet and started making it standard, and they still fuck it up (and it probably would've taken longer if COVID didn't force the issue and punish those lagging).
That said 2 of the largest hurdles i've seen in everyone's "magically ideal" game are enemy AI and Plot.
Interesting and well designed enemy AI is still hard, and even games that did it well built the whole game around it (FEAR) and the system is vastly less impressive without that focus (Just Cause). I don't think we're anywhere near modern AI solving the issue of making a good AI system for a game due to design space problems, but it might.
Plot though...that's tricky. Everyone always says how cool it would be for everything to be like Mass Effect or more, with all choices mattering and everything interacting, but someone has to write that. AI is not turning out well though out plot points that don't feel like the equivalent of Bethesda mission creep.
Point of this whole ramble being that in arcadey/simple stuff I think we'll see a lot more great games (and would argue we already were with the growth of the indie scene over the last 15 years thanks to steam and other tools), but there's still going to be entire genres that are just miserable to develop.
Their "good games" is different from our "good games".
To us, games like BG3 or E33 are masterpiece, but let take a look the most profitable games, GTA V, that is their "masterpiece". R* Knows this and high chance GTA 6 will continue this trend, a passable story combined with top notch graphic and physic, which both AI is really good at already
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.
There will be no more "celeste" games where you join for the platforming but stay for the (politically offensive to all sides) story, because AIs won't discuss the story as it's politically incorrect. Celeste is fundamentally about depression and anxiety, due to being transgender, and is about offending both sides of the argument. First, the main character is transgender, with zero explanation or need for explanation how far that goes, which of course offends conservatives. Second the goal of the main character is to run away from any provided help and professionals (which the director did too) and even under the most extreme of circumstances only reluctantly accept help from a family member that then promptly dies making things "worse".
The Qwen and other Chinese models (and ...) will refuse to discuss being transgender at all, and any western models will shut down any discussion of running away from help hard (because otherwise they get held responsible for the consequences, as has already happened)
(oh and that running away from professional help in psychological issue is actually observed to be a positive thing in almost all cases, in studies. The main way to make psychological problems worse is to let them fester and running away from help is time and time again observed to be far more productive than going to professionals and expecting them to fix things. Because that's an extreme human bias: it can never be (allowed to be) the right reaction to NOT do something about a problem, especially when countless people are paid to "solve" the problem. In other words: if you take people who expressed intent to commit suicide and compare the groups who "get help" and the group that successfully shut down help, less people actually go through with it in the second group, and worse than that, the more intense the help, the better the odds the patient ends up killing themselves. Right to the point that doctors sometimes assist such patients because after 2 years of attempts people live in constant misery and have caused enough medical damage that they will have constant pain or worse the rest of their life. And yet people keep forcing help on patients. Usually in response to an actual suicide where no help was provided. Then more help gets built, and 5 years later we yet again observe ... more suicides. But tell someone with an actual problem to avoid help and you'll be skinned alive for that)
So AI could never make a game like that. Not because it actually can't, or isn't capable, but because there already is a strong political bias, in every model you might use to make it and neither side is going to back down on their policies. The Chinese Communist Party is not suddenly going to change it's mind about transgenderism. And the western models are not suddenly going to openly discuss running away from psychological help, not even as part of a story.
I get that AI anxiety is running high. But, this is doomerism running hard.
Needle in a Haystack Simulator is the new Threes!https://www.theverge.com/22914955/threes-2048-ketchapp-copyc... A very simple game to clone that gets 10,000 headlines because creators have always been anxious about cheap clones. And, anxiety drives the clicks that pay the bills.
Meanwhile, local models are already extremely capable and slowly shrinking their gap vs. frontier models over time. And, it has been long established that the censorship trained into those models can be disabled easily with open-source tools. De-censored models will happily dig into topics that push beyond the limits of sanity, let alone political pearl-clutching.
Besides that. If you want to write about some topic and AI doesn't want to help you, you still have your fingers. Type like a human and you haven't lost anything compared to when Celeste was made.
Hmm. Never heard of non-conservatives thinking Celeste was offensive. It seemed clear to me that a large part of her character arc was learning to accept help when it was offered.
It will lead nowhere. Graphics intensive video games as interactive environments benefit from efficient rendering done by hardware a fraction of the cost of what a neural network requires for the same output. This is a business dead end.
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".
The 80's Japanese train station clip also had the conductor speaking clear english in an accent I can't quite place. Slight British tinge to it but not really? Not sure. The ambient audio also makes no sense.
I've seen weird stuff in images that OpenAI sends me in it's promotional emails too. I would think that if you were trying to show off you'd make sure there's none of these obvious AI issues in what you choose to show off with. Maybe they don't really care? "Gemini choose 10 scenes that would be impressive for our announcement and add them to the post."
That entire clip looks like it's straight out of a complete bargain-bin videogame. The weird smoothness of the ride, the pivot in mid air, the wings apparently don't have collision with the poles they fly past.
Definitely wouldn't have been one of my picks to show off my fancy new model.
There's also a whole extra bonus castle that appears to the left when the camera looks left around 0:22. Which is amusing both because it wasn't there on the initial approach, and also because nobody puts two castles each with their own distinct curtain walls right next to each other like that.
The oddest thing about this, to me at least, is that they pick that as their showcase. Did they themselves not notice? Or did they think their potential customers wouldn’t? Not sure really which of the two is worse.
Cool demos, but does anybody else find it troubling that companies keep claiming this tech can train robots? It’s so obviously not representative of the real world.
> Cool demos, but does anybody else find it troubling that companies keep claiming this tech can train robots? It’s so obviously not representative of the real world.
A proprietary version of this technology is already training Waymo's robot cars. Waymo blogged about their DeepMind-provided world model a year ago.
> It’s so obviously not representative of the real world.
That entirely depends on the use-case and level of granularity needed, doesn't it?
Subreddits where SolidGoldMagikarp was counting to a million in comments were used to train a machine that then writes web pages that more machines are trained on. The sheer volume of data with sufficient verisimilitude generated by these models may well work to train robots. It might not, but I think it might well work. The idea that things have to be high-fidelity high-quality to yield good results has clearly not held up in other domains.
This stands out to me too, it seems to be representative of physics the way a video game is representative of physics, likely less so given the non-determinism
When your training simulation fails to reproduce certain features of the real-world environment, your control model is likely to have trouble with them, so more realistic simulations are helpful, but even fairly unrealistic training simulations are pretty useful.
In general, training neural networks to control robots is going to require simulations, ideally differentiable simulations. Even if they aren't differentiable, though, you can SGD your simulated training runs across a data center in a way that you just can't with training runs on Roombas.
I think its a useful exercise to try and name a cultural artifact (picture, video, game, music, book, etc) that was improved, or made substantially possible, by this technology. Ideally something that has moved you or provoked a lasting response.
Conversely, try to think of examples where Generative AI has betrayed a lack of creativity or care from the creator, and thus left a sour or ambivalent or impression.
I find the former impossibly hard, and the latter depressingly easy. Do others feel the same?
There are tons of cool, creative, funny and wow stuff being done with AI. A third of my Instagram feed is AI creators and some of the stuff they do is mind blowing, but even when it's not super impressive, some of it is just so creative and well done. Saiyenfeld is amazing (DBZ Seinfeld mashup by grickusai). It's taking a medium that is familiar, putting a spin on it and doing it well. You can do things that you couldn't do otherwise. People with interesting concepts can finally get them out of their head into something really interesting. People are so doomer and depressed, but they purposely don't see the stuff that is just fucking fun. I spend all day with a 5090 and courses and I still can't make stuff as good, creative, cool or funny as these people who actually have those talents and they are just fuddling through with token services.
If you want to get inspired go to civitai and look through the top stuff and be wowed. Maybe they didn't draw it, but they figured out how to make it happen and when you look at enough generated stuff you can tell the average from the holy shit. It's easy to get inspired by what people can come up with and want to do something yourself, which is a positive impact I'd say.
By Genie specifically? Or by generative AI in general?
If you mean world models like Genie,I don't know. If you mean the latter, I have definitely used software that I have enjoyed that I do not believe would have been possible without generative AI.
Fluxer is the first Discord competitor that when you show to someone they can't say "well Discord does X better", and it was largely made using AI.
Herdr is designed for AI usage, but I actually really like it even for just normal terminal multiplexing. It was surely made with a lot of AI.
I have seen people make incredible things at my work that have actually solved multi-year long pain points that we've never had the resources to address before.
I have used AI to patch and revive a bunch of small services like chat bots or web services and such that I had made and had decayed into failure over the years.
Sure, it's easy to point at people using AI as a megaphone for their lack of care. But I don't think it's impossibly hard to find people doing good things with it either.
Software might be the exception, but I think some skepticism is still warranted.
When software is hard there's a kind of filter; a good piece of software means a human/team behind it with grit and care and user empathy. You can have some* confidence in the continued stability and maintenance of the software. (*relatively speaking, and with huge error bars).
Without knowing the details of Fluxer, if someone tells me about a vibecoded Discord clone, my immediate thoughts are like:
- how much thought and care went into this?
- how much work from Discord has been cannibalized?
- will the authors be around next week to keep maintaining and making improvements and thinking deeply about their users?
I have also seen a lot of fantastic demos and stuff with AI coding. I use AI coding all day. I just think there's a weird gap still, where code and images and text are all "cheap", but none of this has translated into anything I personally use or care about.
They're not really promising to do that. It's not even clear this model will be meaningfully commercialized. The key line is "Understanding and simulating the world is a crucial aspect of building AGI". This model will be used for research and robotics, and maybe the training of further models.
Without getting into a larger argument about whether this is the correct approach to building AGI, I think its reasonable to ask people to engage with how this technology gets used in practice, besides its nominal purpose of "building AGI".
The predominant way people engage with this technology right now is through slop content in their instagram feeds.
(Btw I say all this as someone that has worked on generative models for 10 years).
Throw a gifted storyteller at any medium and they will produce something worth paying attention to. AI generated content has not had that moment yet. I'm not sure it will ever, but it's worth thinking about.
It took the medium of film ~50 years to find Hitchock and ~75 to find Spielberg.
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.
It's just a lame gimmick, this is not 2024 anymore, people have started to get sick of this AI thingie, especially when it comes to video/image generation. That Simon guy with his pelican is the exception that can only be seen on tech forums like this one.
As to why US (and probably also some Chinese) companies have started pouring hundreds of billions into AI-image generation is beyond my comprehension, but on the other hand I'm no economic genius.
If I can’t realistically use it then I don’t care, especially when there’s no independent proof yet it works this well, given a cursory glance. If it trickles down into future developments I can use then cool, but it likely won’t because they want a moat. You don’t have to shield the poor defenseless multi-billion dollar megacorp from the genuine apathy they inspire.
If this is the best “frontier” they can achieve, then it’s no wonder they haven’t done anything groundbreaking in the space yet that produces practical results.
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.
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.
I’ve decide that the best (and maybe only) way for me to interact with google AI models, is on the search results
It’s where I get the most value, and my expectations are very low, no attachment if it goes away
Of course they are mining me for data anyway, but they were doing that before already (and I do have a Gmail account, although I’ve almost completely stopped using Chrome - btw, it’s crazy that you can’t add plugins/extensions to Chrome on Guest mode)
That touches on the core reason not to get excited about these Google releases: They release something cool and then don't iterate on it. Instead they go off building another cool demo instead.
Gah. Go iterate. Listen to customers, adapt, iterate some more etc etc. That's how products are made.
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.
This is a reflection of a complaint I frequently make about so called "world models". It's more accurate to call them video game models. They don't simulate the world, they simulate video games. For that reason a common issue with them is that the physics are video game physics rather than real world physics.
I'm sure you're probably right about video games being used in training and, as a result, the models reflecting video game physics: No air resistance, no static/dynamic friction curve, etc.
However, I don't think that's the problem in the example of the marble bust not toppling. It would have toppled in a video game engine as well; they model gravity and inertia just fine.
I think what's happening is the model isn't being a world model at all, it's being a language model. It's trying to make the "scripted" thing happen, and it probably "feels" like the script should end in the bust on the pedestal.
Which is fine for a video game. Not at all fine if you want to train robots with it. Trying to combine both use cases into a single model is doomed to failure IMO.
People are arguing if the marble bust should've toppled over or not, completely missing the fact that marble is brittle and the bust would have surely cracked
How often do things in the real world not behave exactly as you expected them to?
I feeling I get from this is that this could be the mental model for a robot in the real world, continuously corrected by actual events.
We all have a world model in our heads of what we think is going to happen, we adjust quickly (or not) based on what does. This is pretty incredible stuff.
> How often do things in the real world not behave exactly as you expected them to?
They wouldn't be called "Laws of Physics" if obeying them was optional. If your center of gravity is outside your base, you _will_ topple over. That's just how gravity works.
I agree but I feel like the exaggerated physics were intentional and fitting with the video theme. If they had wanted it to topple, they wouldn't have posted the video.
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 loop 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.
It's where (ex-)"AI luminaries" go to die. It's a way to make glacial, slow progress in the correct direction while never actually getting anywhere.
So we get to a point and people keep making complicated simulations of one kind or another ... and then someone (some model) 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.
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.
But remember, today is the worst the models will ever be. I agree they are still safe though... they will probably use AI to make even more films faster and more creative since it enables them to do more.
Not that I have zero trust in anything AI related that Google demos, but the first video example on the right, the model completely ignores inputs towards the end.
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
Isn't that a simpler explanation of reality than the zillions of particles all existing simultaneously in this massive universe?
Some sort of simple primal generative AI construct that just feeds a conscious experience for one. You. Nothing else is real. No one else is real.
Something like that would be an infinitely simpler, than running the physics and conscious experiences of this unimaginably large universe we think we're in.
Simplicity is only relevant to humans (and other animals that evolved into trying to forecast their survival). Most of the universe seems to prefer chaos. So no, from a universal perspective, there is no reason for reality to be simple or elegant.
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"
Google is already public, has a larger more normie customer base, many products to integrate AI in with established enterprise accounts in the millions... For some reason theyre not valued at 50:1 revenue... I dont think all that many people are going to be that excited for Anthropic as a business, Its an escape hatch, using the public as exit liquidity while the founders can still make a 100bil.
If the checker clip is meant to be used to develop a robot to play checkers, then the physics is not remotely good enough. When the robot takes the first piece, the piece looks like it's moving up from the board, then suddenly doesn't. The last move also isn't valid checkers, unless I'm missing something -- the robot offers its piece to be eaten and the human doesn't take it.
A few years from now, Lydia in Skyrim will have a fully consistent personality with dynamic dialogue and full contextual memories of all our adventures together in Skyrim.
A visual makeover is great but what happens when millions of people fall in love with virtual characters who seem to deserve that love?
Question is if we even want that. Video games often are escapism, we want an illusion of reality but not actual reality. I mean there definitely is a market for that, but I don't think it's for everyone.
There was a comic book about comic books I read when I was young. I believe it was "Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art" - part of it dealt with what is gained and lost with realism.
In a nutshell, (with my memory of 30-40 years), the more and more realistic a scene becomes, the less the brain applies it to ourself. It becomes this definite place, definite person, rather than ourself or our surroundings projected into other characters.
All these scenes, that I guess are amazing, they all are creepy to me.
That actually sounds implementable even now! Except the fully consistent personality part. And maybe that's a good thing. Falling in love with beings without physical presence sounds agonizing; probably better spent on real people.
I imagine you could implement the fully consistent personality by putting a recurring dream about the player, followed by waking up, in Lydia's context at startup.
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.
Astonishing to me that a company like Google would be willing to publish such a terrible looking product demo. Interactive, but with completely made-up inputs that are ignored?
I think you're exactly right. This was already a problem with Genie 3, but they've appear to have gone all in on video generation over controllability.
The original Genie was a great piece of work with a real sense of purpose - to enable agents to learn about the real world in the way Dreamer or Schmidhuber's paper sketched. But now most of the people that drove that mission have left Deepmind (Jack Parker-Holder, Tim Rocktaschel, Demis) and it's become this instead.
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.
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.
I don't know. With each new release of these models, they compare side-by-side how they are better than the previous ones, but at the same time I feel less impressed by each new release. Somehow they manage to be a seemingly big step forward but at the same time I feel I have seen so much AI that I just look at the common failure modes and they are all still there.
It's easy for them to show demos of abstract things because they don't necessarily have to follow real-world rules, but anything modeled after real world falls short of expectations.
I would like to see how it breaks, don't spend all your focus on how nice it looks with specially curated shots. At least give a few examples of what happens when it breaks from running too long. They mention that it can fail under "Understanding current limitations" but don't show any examples. Especially since they mention the cases of safety and responsible use, it seems quite relevant to help prepare people by showing them some examples of how it can break and so you an learn to spot it.
"controlling" some kid-height character. the button-pressing seems almost frustrated with the lack of response, long holds with no (or opposite) change and sometimes mashing. are they supposed to be buttons a person pressed to direct it? or did it create those too?
Again, very impressive from a technical point. But language is so flawed to do anything creative. It just turns out all looking the same and kind of boring
Looks like we are inching closer to on the fly open world game creation soon. While the updates excite me as a senior data scientist but as a human they all just look scary. Just me?
The non-coherence of the world is a pretty solid tell. Any time the camera pans away and then back, the scene changes. The model doesn't remember what used to be there dozens of frames ago and so it invents something new.
Humans interact with their environment by subconsciously simulating it and predicting what will happen in the next few moments. This ability gives us the capacity to work more efficiently and reliably in any environment. These world models will serve a similar purpose to the AI and robotic systems of tomorrow. This is a foundational piece.
We don't have to fall off a cliff to learn to drive on a mountain road, we can imagine the consequences for cheaper. If we didn't have imagination life would be much more dangerous.
Podcasting is going through the thousand cheap ads with the obnoxiously inserted interstitial ads. What they have accomplished is me unsubscribing to the worst offending podcast and beginning the journey of ad blocking on podcast with the help of whisper and LLMs. Also now I hate Shopify with the heat of a 1000 burning suns due to their obnoxious ads and the insane rate they get played.
So yea that one expensive ad would probably have a positive impact compared to a tidal wave of slop. Quality > Quantity after all.
A nit, but given that this is from a major corporation, and LLMs are supposed to be em-dash-happy, it's surprising (disappointing?) that the announcement uses:
> audio-like music
That's a hyphen. What's "audio-like music" -- music that is almost sound but not quite? Music made from raw audio? :-)
Yeah, I think that sentence was supposed to be: Genie 4 is natively multimodal, enabling audio--like music, ambient noises, and interactive dialogue--to be simultaneously generated with the world.
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
And their most impactful application will be training smaller models for military drones to detect, target and kill humans. sigh...
Every time I'm about to be excited about AI the cynic in me slaps me back to reality. I imagine the endless possibilities of AI for disabled people, then realize that it's going to leave millions of people disabled instead.
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.
Can someone ELI5 how this "Leads to AGI"? I can kind of understand some sort of "theory of mind" going on here, but how would having a complex world model enable, say, an AGI that could file my taxes for me?
AGI is a loaded phrase these days. But if we focus on how it will improve the quality of training data for LLMs, I can prob talk about that.
Right now LLMs only have text, images, and videos to train from. Anything it understands about physics is from an abstract level. It's like learning how to calculate throwing a baseball before you've ever even thrown a baseball. Imagine having to learn force = mass x acceleration before you've even picked up a ball.
What this world generation Google is doing appears to be something Nvidia has spoken about too. Letting LLMs/AI learn from a world physics simulation. Meaning LLMs having the opportunity to "experience" physics, the same way you intuitively know how to throw a ball after attempting a few times yourself.
If an LLM can better understand how our real world works the quality of its output improves -- theoretically.
As far as your taxes go, you can create an intelligent workflow right now to do that for you. Don't need AGI for that.
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.
If only there was some way we could create some sort of arrangement of 3D models and place a virtual camera within the arrangement. We could introduce some physics simulation and make the position of the virtual camera move and render what it sees to the user.
If such a system were possible, it seems like it would be far better at consistency and realism, since it could be fine tuned and hand crafted to best represent the desired world. It could be used to make interactive experiences, games, perhaps even feature films!
Honestly MiniMax H3 looks better than this at most of the things I've been able to generate locally. These look super AAA game like - movement is uncanny and feels like it was trained on GTA3 or something like that - is this just me?
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?
That all sounds right to me, but apparently they can also be used for simply generating videos, or "unlocking the creation of new interactive experiences"... which both seem like competing goals with everything you just mentioned.
Why do we need this? No thank you. We don't need flying cars and more vendor lock in. We need to serve the current google within constraints. That should be driving direction. Being a better ecosystem member. Another fascist product from google.
I am again so disappointed with the discourse about AI in these threads. It rarely if ever focuses on anything remotely technical. People just trot out their agenda and their opinions (much like what I am doing now). We are building civilization level tools and the most technical analysis I see is that the blog post announcing it was written by an LLM (it wasn't) or that an ogre riding a unicorn into the clouds of Venus was missing a claw (wth?).
Yah, meta is discouraged here but why are we as a community putting up with this level of meta disruption? I guess I'm supposed to adapt to the new community but there's nothing there there.
I will stick with the more technical posts here and avoid anything to do with a new AI model and the complete and shocking thoughtlessness of the commenters (most of them).
This is part of analyzing model output against others and known capabilities. The Orge riding a bike is just a QA test. Maybe you can work on civilization level testing tools.
I didn't see any comments related to that - now I understand. Your reply does not seem to be in good faith, then you pick on the poster not the message.
Why are they plowing money into this garbage? I don't understand it. I guess it is because Google is lagging behind in the AI race but the roi of this bs must be close to zero. Clowns.
So if those genie 4 characters have all individual chain of thought reasoning and persistent retrospection / recollection, how do these human characters know they are not living in a simulation made by biological humans? Not sure you understand what i'm getting at. Some ethical questions do arise.
It could be even weirder. We might be playing video games that are essentially built from the ground up by and for the individual gamer, such that the concept of a "game", let alone the same game, doesn't even make sense. Same for what we have called movies and TV for the last 100 years.
Hi, I always loved watching Pixar movies, partly because I knew that what took them days to render (in their literal data center) would eventually be done in real-time on my desktop.
In the same way, seeing that something is possible gives hope to the people who are making those open models that you want.
What the fuck are the little wasd/arrow keys supposed to mean? They have no relationship to the movement of the character or the camera. It's just flashing buttons.
But to what end? How does this help humanity? How does this help us encounter truth and beauty? Whether you look at this from a utilitarian angle or from a transcendental one, it is a collosal waste of time, energy, and money.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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)
None of this makes sense. Think of the economics involved here: is it cheaper to run tens/hundreds of thousands of GPU clusters to simulate a unique game world for millions of players, or would it be cheaper to just write the god damn code once, and then host it for download, or to allow them to be streamed?
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.
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, and absolutely none of it is algorithmic. World models, as complex as they are, are still just pushing numbers around on paper.
Even if we can show that it is technically possible to model a universe like ours to the degree that our current perception of reality suggests exists, there are three other big factors that would need to be weighed:
Is it feasible? What Dyson sphere level of power would be needed to maintain such a simulation? Is that level of energy available to whomever is running the simulation?
Is there a positive ROI? What does this advanced civilization get out of running such an expensive simulation?
Is it moral? The simulation involves sentient creatures who are capable of deeply contemplating their own existence, capable of feeling rapturous pleasure and indescribable pain and loss, and ostensibly capable of making moral choices that range from heroic to depraved. Doesn't there come a point where the beings in a simulation are so close to the beings in "base reality" that the same moral principles apply? If you press a button that kicks off a simulation where humans can torture and murder each other, behaving essentially identically to humans in "base reality," aren't you in some sense facilitating those deaths?
> What Dyson sphere level of power would be needed to maintain such a simulation
Why would you assume energy is relevant to whoever turned on our simulation? If I created a simulation where the only source of energy was cotton candy, my creations might ask "but where would our creator even get enough cotton candy to run a simulation like this", not realize that it's absurd to think that the creator of a simulation has any of the same constraints that exist inside the simulation.
You run it to see if your military tactics will defeat the enemy and then you keep running it until you find a strategy that guarantees victory. Who cares if some sim lives are churned through the simulation, our lives are at stake!
Reductionist but I feel like that’s how it would go.
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
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.
For several of these examples the details change if something goes out of frame and returns. A second castle is added in the dragon one. The people walking away from the camera change in the train platform one. The Hong Kong moped rider doesn't have a helmet and then he has one.
It's very good at maintaining consistency for things that stay in frame, but I don't know that this points to it developing a strong "world simulation" like they claim.
It's like its simulation model is confined to the renderable area. At the cost of increased computation, it would not be hard to generalize the technique to rendering a sphere centered around the POV to keep some of those artifacts at bay; however, the fundamental limitation of "object permanence" remains if objects can evolve chaotically as soon as they are blocked from view by another object. For that to be made stable, you really need a whole 3D model of the scene, and the cost increase there might be huge.
> While it can maintain coherent environments over short sessions, visual details and object permanence can still shift or drift over time—especially as a simulation runs longer, after multiple complex prompt edits, or when navigating throughout the scene. Complex physical interactions, real-time audio accuracy, rendering legible text, spatial accuracy, and long-term consistency are active areas of ongoing research.
If it was actually not hard, they would have made their demo with it. I don't know the technical details, but I expect a product reveal like this to show the thing at its absolute best.
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I am not sure you need something so complex. If objects on scene could be tagged with their location, and the camera movement tracked to identify when it brings the same objects back into scene, then the model can use its positional information to validate if the next rendered scene contains all the objects that should be expected.
Though, I am not sure well this retains temporal stability. I am just thinking about how in 3D rendering, objects are tracked as individual things and only culled, but all the data about them still exists.
Maybe the models need to reason as a 3D space first, then turn chosen objects into renderings?
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> For that to be made stable, you really need a whole 3D model of the scene, and the cost increase there might be huge.
I suspect it is, because the 2D -> 3D models I've seen are terrible, but more importantly the 2D -> 3d models are terrible. Noteworthy because I suspect the number of people who have 3D scans laying around is tiny.
What you're describing is vaguely how video games work, to my understanding. There may be interesting parallels if that becomes a technique (like how distant objects are sometimes still rendered, but at a lower resolution/polygon count).
> fundamental limitation of "object permanence" remains if objects can evolve chaotically as soon as they are blocked from view by another object.
they got this working decently well for video over a year ago, maybe closer to two years ago at this point, time goes fast. so i assume it'll translate to progress in Genie too
This sounds like bunch of gibberish you made up
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I don’t understand why these world models aren’t designed to be backed by an updatable world state. It could probably just lay out the world onetime and reference it as needed vs trying to invent from wholecloth via diffusion. Object persistence!
> It's very good at maintaining consistency for things that stay in frame
I noticed several inconsistencies in things that stayed in frame. See the wall on the bridge in the Van Gogh example as they walk past it to see the other side.
I bet it's configurable and just a matter of how much resource you want to allocate. If it's truly a world model then it seems to me that it's precise benefit is that it can keep track and order in things and they just choose to accept some noise/chaos/randomness/? for the demos when things move out frame? Does that sound sensible? I'm just guessing but don't feel it's a hard limit.
It just doesn't have object permanence yet!
And these are the examples they chose. I have to wonder if they add some with mistakes on purpose.
If it's anything like their other anything related to AI, we're seeing cherry picked "best possible" examples.
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> Genie 4 has advanced audio capabilities
> Prompt asks for saxophone
Looks inside:
> Sound of a clarinet
Maybe Genie 5 will get it.
I watched it on mute, and even so I figured it didn't sound great, given that the guy's fingers barely move at all.
Perfection doesnt exist - technology will never free us from the human condition & constant struggles...
A sultry saxophone riff would free me from the human condition & constant struggles. Come on Genie!
I ain't asking for perfection here.
King Curtis said otherwise.
It looks like they had a hard time with the magic wand, peacock-to-cat example. Despite using a very long prompt that repeatedly stresses that the video should look photorealistic and NOT like a video game, the output video looks like a video game. The model is clearly capable of generating photorealistic humans and animals, so I wonder why it struggled to do so with that particular prompt.
Probably too much of the training data that has Magic wands were from a video game.
When people talk about "photorealism" it's to describe something not real (like video game graphics and artwork) that looks almost like a real photo/video. So you don't say that a real photo is photorealistic, and if you use that word when prompting models you end up making it not realistic.
> Prompt: A REAL, ultra-photorealistic, high-end 35mm cinematic
What do they mean "Real" here ?
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It's probably trained in a video game-like environment.
I have no idea if that's the case, but it would be funny if it didn't support negative prompting and they got someone to write the prompt who wasn't aware of that.
Edit: Okay, I read the prompts and they use negative phrasing a lot, so I guess it does work, but boy, are these prompts laborious. Requirements are repeated ad nauseam. This model seems to be quite tone deaf.
Surprising how Tencent's HY-World 2.0 open weights world model didn't get as much attention:
https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/HY-World-2.0
Is it surprising? Looking at the demo videos I can absolutely see why it didn't get as much attention. Not that it's not impressive, it is, but these are in different leagues.
Still, it's local, and I can't wait to see what it can do now that I know it exists.
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.
[1]: https://x.com/sama/status/1776083954786836979
> movies are going to become video games and video games are going to become something unimaginably better
God what an annoying thing to say. Suggesting that movies will essentially become games, or that future video games will be unimaginably better (presumably because they are driven by generative world models) betrays such a surface level appreciation for what makes art and culture and all this humanity so beautiful as it is.
The entire point of movies is the deliberate choices of the filmmakers! Movies will not be improved by our ability to choose what the main character looks like or add a style filter. Super Mario 64 is great because it is an expression of the very hardware that constrains it. Inevitable future versions where anything can happen because someone hooked the ROM up to a generative world model won't be better for it.
I agree that this technology is absolutely world changing, and am cautiously eager to see what comes of it, but it just bums me out, perhaps needlessly, that the people at the helm can be so artless, unreflective. Whatever.
yeah some friends of mine in game dev are a bit doom and gloom about all this and I need to keep reminding them that the hard work is making the million decisions that communicate the vision, the code/assets were never really what people were buying your game for. Even assuming an AI could do literally every technical part of game dev someone (for now) needs to sit there and go "nah this part doesn't feel right" and "that boss 2nd phase opener attack is too long" etc. until AI can also answer those questions and intuit what is good and bad taste there's still stuff for game devs to do. "minecraft in skyrim" is cool for about 10 seconds till you think about actually sitting down to play it.
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Sam had OpenAI start the Ghibli style image-gen (movies that are specifically loved for their artisanal quality). The man has patternly failed to read the room around culture.
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> I agree that this technology is absolutely world changing, and am cautiously eager to see what comes of it, but it just bums me out, perhaps needlessly, that the people at the helm can be so artless, unreflective. Whatever.
This is something your average person can play around with. The filmmakers have been fumbling the ball a lot lately (not all the time, though) and I can't wait to see what rises out of the average populous. Lots of crap expected, for sure, but there will be gems in there that I'm willing to bet will blow away what we've seen in the industry. Kind of how indie game companies are eating AAA's lunch lately.
Make something beautiful, with or without the new tech. You and the rest of us will be better for it. And the investors are damn desperate for something to really resonate with the people who experience it.
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We've been living in a world of videogame-like FX movie slop for at least 20 years now, without the help of AI. Try to find insightful reflection of humanity and truth in a Marvel movie... God help you. It's as boring as, well, watching someone else play a video game.
It turns out, some people like that. A lot of people like it, presumably because it's fast and stimulating, and everyone's a sucker for wowing FX even as movie FX have gotten worse and more or less converged with video games.
What's lacking in these movies isn't so much plot, it's character and thoughtfulness. They tell us nothing about ourselves.
From an art history class, long ago, I remember the explanation of how classical Greek culture degraded into depictions if "pathos", visible in changes in the sculpture, and how that heralded more or less the decline of the civilization. It seems obvious to me that we've undergone a similar transition. And the thing is, it's not the technology itself, which could be used to produce meaningful art. It's the lack of thought on the part of the creators and the audience.
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Radio -> Silent Movies -> Talkies -> Movies -> Video Games -> ? Why is this annoying? We are moving toward greater immersion through technology.
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I understand but I wouldn't dismiss how consumer choices already contribute to this
Younger people I know, and market to sometimes, literally avoid "plot based media" in favor of brainrot. Akin to what my generation used to call "sooo random"
People catering to it earn a lot. They don't identify as directors, but they are. They don't identify as artists either. They identify as influencers and brands.
You will never be the generation they engage with. I don't expect to base any of my choices in following trends looking for opportunities to be contingent on your affinity for movies and first/third person games.
Even when it comes to spending, they are a powerhouse because parents nationwide and worldwide give them their weekly allowances in platform credits, with no further accountability on how it's spent. There is a large audience already, trends that are full economies within a few months instead of needing to wait an entire 12 to 20 year generation for the audience to have independent purchasing power.
That's what is happening and why someone with even greater perception than me would say things that seem out of touch, but are closer to reality than you'd realize.
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The Orville show explores this idea, before LLMs became a thing. Simulators become the replacement for movies, but the simulations are still designed by a person (or alien).
The concept feels more like a video game than a movie in the show, but presumably you could program the simulation to happen around you instead of you moving through it.
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Do you think that Super Mario Odyssey is better than Super Mario Bros for the NES? Is Breath of the Wild better than the Legend of Zelda? I mean -- take off your nostalgia-covered glasses and imagine if you handed them both to a kid who had seen neither which one they might be more interested in. Why do you think that is?
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Some movies and some games (or parts of games) really are just for fun. Eg a lot of Bethesda games would improve if you could do a randomly generated storyline on your 4th playthrough, and WoW has 0 storyline to their dailies. It could be kind of fun like a fortune cookie to get a random story. I don't expect art, but it'd be funny to see if it made up a meme-able story.
An awful lot of mainstream movies do have fairly trite plots, with a predictable film style. That's not entirely hate, sometimes I really want to see Michael Bay blow up half of LA. I don't think the next Fast and Furious movie would suffer horribly from AI writing, it's never really been an "art" kind of series anyways.
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> Sometimes I really wanna skip 10 years into the future and see where all this eventually leads.
Sounds glib, but honestly ... more Ads :/
And they will be so severely targeted to you that you won't be able to identify that they are designed to influence your purchasing or voting decisions. And they will be of production quality rivaling the highest budget films - rendered on your own hardware.
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That’s optimistic, assuming we are still valuable as consumers.
Such a boring knee jerk reaction to things.
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So, people will be able to completely skip living in the real world, and instead spend their entire time plugged into a simulation, like a vegetable.
Sounds wonderful. May as well skip this and just spend my life hooked up to an IV drip of drugs.
Sounds like the plot from the movie matrix. Only difference between the movie and our real timeline - the ai didn't need to enslave humans, we willingly chose enslavement by ai for ourselves by continuing our google subscription.
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People already do this in many video games. The simulation isn't perfect, and maybe there's a tipping point where the simulation becomes real enough that it (maybe) supplants "reality". In a sense, this is disintermediation: instead of actually riding horse, I can ride a virtual dragon. Does that make it worse, or problematic? Again, we already have this, for driving race cars, fighting in wars, etc. etc. It's just a matter of fidelity and immersion?
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The Bliss IV is an upcharge subscription, though.
This is why UBI bad.
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For some... that is sadly a better existence in cases.
Video games are already movies that are video games.
The ending cutscene of Metal Gear Solid 4 alone is a full feature-length film.
(And it’s annoying as hell if you actually want to play a game rather than watch a movie.)
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It will lead to garbage.
Also, does anyone want movies to become games? I don't. I want movies to be movies. Good movies. With interesting stories, beautiful artistic cinematography, great characters, moving paintings as Lynch said it.
If I want games, I'll play games.
People still love oral story telling (standup). Adding more immersion doesn't necessarily enhance the experience.
For me, this does nothing. I am attracted to film and gaming for the artistry and deliberate choices made by the authors. A synthetic approach may be stimulating but I find it ultimately void.
Like, movies sometimes have alternate endings. What if they were more choice driven, and replayable. Video games have remarkably dumb ideas that keep persisting, like you can encapsulate all that is “Health” as an integer. Instead games can be an aggregation of entity bound micro-simulation that create emergent scenarios, yet follow the laws of narrative collectively. Games that build themselves. Worlds within worlds kinda jazz.
10yrs isn't far enough. 2016 wasn't that different from today relative to media.
We’ve seen a lot of changes since 2016 including the rise of short form video, podcasts, audiobooks, music streaming, substack, even vinyl is up 3x (!)
Practically nobody consumed short form TikTok-like media in 2016. Now it's a highly dominant type of media.
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> Sometimes I really wanna skip 10 years into the future and see where all this eventually leads.
Either the desert of the real, or something unimaginable to Mk 1 humans.
> 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.
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Great, I guess I can say bye bye to movies
With VR coming and then going technology has shown itself to hold within it no more immersive capability than a good book. It is not about rendering firepower it is about hitting the right notes.
Type of thing he would say.
Llms wont be able to create good games. Consider for a sec that there's like 500 "Great" games ever made, maybe more but not much, in some genres that number is less than 10. There is no training data, and its largely a matter of taste and culture that cant be represented/distilled into vector embeddings.
While i generally agree, some of this tech could be a major force multiplier and lower the barriers to entry.
Even if you have a great game idea, it takes a ton of time and money to even get it off the ground, let alone get it coded correctly and maybe get the reach you want. A LOT of flash in the pan ideas probably fizzled out faster than they needed (most recently Among Us and Fall Guys come to mind) because they were built to ship, not to easily modify.
Tech like this could lower the barrier to smaller and more creative teams or even individuals and get some better competition in the area. Fighting games KNEW that rollback was the way looooooong before AAA bit the bullet and started making it standard, and they still fuck it up (and it probably would've taken longer if COVID didn't force the issue and punish those lagging).
That said 2 of the largest hurdles i've seen in everyone's "magically ideal" game are enemy AI and Plot.
Interesting and well designed enemy AI is still hard, and even games that did it well built the whole game around it (FEAR) and the system is vastly less impressive without that focus (Just Cause). I don't think we're anywhere near modern AI solving the issue of making a good AI system for a game due to design space problems, but it might.
Plot though...that's tricky. Everyone always says how cool it would be for everything to be like Mass Effect or more, with all choices mattering and everything interacting, but someone has to write that. AI is not turning out well though out plot points that don't feel like the equivalent of Bethesda mission creep.
Point of this whole ramble being that in arcadey/simple stuff I think we'll see a lot more great games (and would argue we already were with the growth of the indie scene over the last 15 years thanks to steam and other tools), but there's still going to be entire genres that are just miserable to develop.
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Their "good games" is different from our "good games".
To us, games like BG3 or E33 are masterpiece, but let take a look the most profitable games, GTA V, that is their "masterpiece". R* Knows this and high chance GTA 6 will continue this trend, a passable story combined with top notch graphic and physic, which both AI is really good at already
What makes a good game has changed over time. Pacman is, honestly, boring as shit now.
Mappy, weirdly enough, holds up well. Bubble Bobble, still good. Mortal Kombat 1, meh.
Some of my favorite classic games, almost unplayable now. Tastes have changed dramatically.
Movies are the same. Very few movies hold up after multiple decades. Some do. But even some great ones don't.
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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.
There will be no more "celeste" games where you join for the platforming but stay for the (politically offensive to all sides) story, because AIs won't discuss the story as it's politically incorrect. Celeste is fundamentally about depression and anxiety, due to being transgender, and is about offending both sides of the argument. First, the main character is transgender, with zero explanation or need for explanation how far that goes, which of course offends conservatives. Second the goal of the main character is to run away from any provided help and professionals (which the director did too) and even under the most extreme of circumstances only reluctantly accept help from a family member that then promptly dies making things "worse".
The Qwen and other Chinese models (and ...) will refuse to discuss being transgender at all, and any western models will shut down any discussion of running away from help hard (because otherwise they get held responsible for the consequences, as has already happened)
(oh and that running away from professional help in psychological issue is actually observed to be a positive thing in almost all cases, in studies. The main way to make psychological problems worse is to let them fester and running away from help is time and time again observed to be far more productive than going to professionals and expecting them to fix things. Because that's an extreme human bias: it can never be (allowed to be) the right reaction to NOT do something about a problem, especially when countless people are paid to "solve" the problem. In other words: if you take people who expressed intent to commit suicide and compare the groups who "get help" and the group that successfully shut down help, less people actually go through with it in the second group, and worse than that, the more intense the help, the better the odds the patient ends up killing themselves. Right to the point that doctors sometimes assist such patients because after 2 years of attempts people live in constant misery and have caused enough medical damage that they will have constant pain or worse the rest of their life. And yet people keep forcing help on patients. Usually in response to an actual suicide where no help was provided. Then more help gets built, and 5 years later we yet again observe ... more suicides. But tell someone with an actual problem to avoid help and you'll be skinned alive for that)
So AI could never make a game like that. Not because it actually can't, or isn't capable, but because there already is a strong political bias, in every model you might use to make it and neither side is going to back down on their policies. The Chinese Communist Party is not suddenly going to change it's mind about transgenderism. And the western models are not suddenly going to openly discuss running away from psychological help, not even as part of a story.
So really, we've just lost these games.
I get that AI anxiety is running high. But, this is doomerism running hard.
Needle in a Haystack Simulator is the new Threes! https://www.theverge.com/22914955/threes-2048-ketchapp-copyc... A very simple game to clone that gets 10,000 headlines because creators have always been anxious about cheap clones. And, anxiety drives the clicks that pay the bills.
Meanwhile, local models are already extremely capable and slowly shrinking their gap vs. frontier models over time. And, it has been long established that the censorship trained into those models can be disabled easily with open-source tools. De-censored models will happily dig into topics that push beyond the limits of sanity, let alone political pearl-clutching.
Besides that. If you want to write about some topic and AI doesn't want to help you, you still have your fingers. Type like a human and you haven't lost anything compared to when Celeste was made.
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Hmm. Never heard of non-conservatives thinking Celeste was offensive. It seemed clear to me that a large part of her character arc was learning to accept help when it was offered.
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It will lead nowhere. Graphics intensive video games as interactive environments benefit from efficient rendering done by hardware a fraction of the cost of what a neural network requires for the same output. This is a business dead end.
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".
The 80's Japanese train station clip also had the conductor speaking clear english in an accent I can't quite place. Slight British tinge to it but not really? Not sure. The ambient audio also makes no sense.
I've seen weird stuff in images that OpenAI sends me in it's promotional emails too. I would think that if you were trying to show off you'd make sure there's none of these obvious AI issues in what you choose to show off with. Maybe they don't really care? "Gemini choose 10 scenes that would be impressive for our announcement and add them to the post."
The accent is received pronunciation, like Tom Hiddleston. It sounds like Tom's voice. Perfectly normal British accent.
That entire clip looks like it's straight out of a complete bargain-bin videogame. The weird smoothness of the ride, the pivot in mid air, the wings apparently don't have collision with the poles they fly past.
Definitely wouldn't have been one of my picks to show off my fancy new model.
Getting good quality dragon POV flight data for SFT must be really hard.
the goal posts have definitely moved since the original will smith spaghetti video huh?
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There's also a whole extra bonus castle that appears to the left when the camera looks left around 0:22. Which is amusing both because it wasn't there on the initial approach, and also because nobody puts two castles each with their own distinct curtain walls right next to each other like that.
"Storm the castle!"
"Which one!?"
The oddest thing about this, to me at least, is that they pick that as their showcase. Did they themselves not notice? Or did they think their potential customers wouldn’t? Not sure really which of the two is worse.
Neither one: I think this is the best output they could get.
customers? You can buy Genie? It's still very much in tech preview, research phase.
In the original dragon clip, at 0:29 we can see a square tower in the right side of the screen
As he passes by the tower, it becomes round, by 0:40
It is always incredible to me how quickly we go from "this entire technology is pure science fiction" to "nitpicking over details"
It's not, it's just that hacker news is a hyperbolic bikeshedding chamber.
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I was under the impression he has already fly past the catapult.
Cool demos, but does anybody else find it troubling that companies keep claiming this tech can train robots? It’s so obviously not representative of the real world.
> Cool demos, but does anybody else find it troubling that companies keep claiming this tech can train robots? It’s so obviously not representative of the real world.
A proprietary version of this technology is already training Waymo's robot cars. Waymo blogged about their DeepMind-provided world model a year ago.
> It’s so obviously not representative of the real world.
That entirely depends on the use-case and level of granularity needed, doesn't it?
Isn’t the Waymo version used for some small portion of the dataset to cover edge cases that they have no real data for?
This blog is suggesting that we could train robots using only a world model.
> Do you have a basis for this idea, or it's a gut-feel?
My basis is that I’m a real human and these videos look far more like bad video games than the real life I’ve experienced.
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Train robots feels like the academia justification excuse when we really know the value of this will be entertainment.
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Subreddits where SolidGoldMagikarp was counting to a million in comments were used to train a machine that then writes web pages that more machines are trained on. The sheer volume of data with sufficient verisimilitude generated by these models may well work to train robots. It might not, but I think it might well work. The idea that things have to be high-fidelity high-quality to yield good results has clearly not held up in other domains.
Has anyone ever tracked down SolidGoldMagikarp and interviewed them? It's such a uniquely bizarre claim to fame.
Elon revealed to the world that you can just lie and people will give you money, so now they all lie.
Elizabeth shows us that it has to be the right lie though.
This stands out to me too, it seems to be representative of physics the way a video game is representative of physics, likely less so given the non-determinism
Gemini Robotics is a thing: https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-robotics/
They clearly know how to train robots. Unless Genie is a misdirection...
I guess they want military contracts or something.
You can get useful levels of robot training out of Super Mario Bros 2; see John Carmack's talk from last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4epAfU1FCuQ
When your training simulation fails to reproduce certain features of the real-world environment, your control model is likely to have trouble with them, so more realistic simulations are helpful, but even fairly unrealistic training simulations are pretty useful.
In general, training neural networks to control robots is going to require simulations, ideally differentiable simulations. Even if they aren't differentiable, though, you can SGD your simulated training runs across a data center in a way that you just can't with training runs on Roombas.
> 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
I'm blessed to see that even google let their most important marketing prosa be generated by ai models without any proofreading from fleshy humans.
That isn't a mistake AI would make though -- it's something a human would accidentally do when replacing em dashes with hyphens
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It could have been a human trying to justify their existence. "no no, I wrote this ad copy myself: look, no em-dashes!".
Quite the reverse honestly, I found it really funny that they didn't bother to have an AI proofread it before sending out
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."
or just "music-like audio"?
Have you listened to "music" created by non-specialized models that use WebAudio to create?
It seems like a good descriptor to me! ;)
As opposed to video-like music...
I think its a useful exercise to try and name a cultural artifact (picture, video, game, music, book, etc) that was improved, or made substantially possible, by this technology. Ideally something that has moved you or provoked a lasting response.
Conversely, try to think of examples where Generative AI has betrayed a lack of creativity or care from the creator, and thus left a sour or ambivalent or impression.
I find the former impossibly hard, and the latter depressingly easy. Do others feel the same?
There are tons of cool, creative, funny and wow stuff being done with AI. A third of my Instagram feed is AI creators and some of the stuff they do is mind blowing, but even when it's not super impressive, some of it is just so creative and well done. Saiyenfeld is amazing (DBZ Seinfeld mashup by grickusai). It's taking a medium that is familiar, putting a spin on it and doing it well. You can do things that you couldn't do otherwise. People with interesting concepts can finally get them out of their head into something really interesting. People are so doomer and depressed, but they purposely don't see the stuff that is just fucking fun. I spend all day with a 5090 and courses and I still can't make stuff as good, creative, cool or funny as these people who actually have those talents and they are just fuddling through with token services.
If you want to get inspired go to civitai and look through the top stuff and be wowed. Maybe they didn't draw it, but they figured out how to make it happen and when you look at enough generated stuff you can tell the average from the holy shit. It's easy to get inspired by what people can come up with and want to do something yourself, which is a positive impact I'd say.
I'm glad you feel this way.
I can't personally relate, and I think its kind of telling that I'm being down-voted for simply asking people to engage with this thought experiment.
By Genie specifically? Or by generative AI in general?
If you mean world models like Genie,I don't know. If you mean the latter, I have definitely used software that I have enjoyed that I do not believe would have been possible without generative AI.
Fluxer is the first Discord competitor that when you show to someone they can't say "well Discord does X better", and it was largely made using AI.
Herdr is designed for AI usage, but I actually really like it even for just normal terminal multiplexing. It was surely made with a lot of AI.
I have seen people make incredible things at my work that have actually solved multi-year long pain points that we've never had the resources to address before.
I have used AI to patch and revive a bunch of small services like chat bots or web services and such that I had made and had decayed into failure over the years.
Sure, it's easy to point at people using AI as a megaphone for their lack of care. But I don't think it's impossibly hard to find people doing good things with it either.
Software might be the exception, but I think some skepticism is still warranted.
When software is hard there's a kind of filter; a good piece of software means a human/team behind it with grit and care and user empathy. You can have some* confidence in the continued stability and maintenance of the software. (*relatively speaking, and with huge error bars).
Without knowing the details of Fluxer, if someone tells me about a vibecoded Discord clone, my immediate thoughts are like: - how much thought and care went into this? - how much work from Discord has been cannibalized? - will the authors be around next week to keep maintaining and making improvements and thinking deeply about their users?
I have also seen a lot of fantastic demos and stuff with AI coding. I use AI coding all day. I just think there's a weird gap still, where code and images and text are all "cheap", but none of this has translated into anything I personally use or care about.
They're not really promising to do that. It's not even clear this model will be meaningfully commercialized. The key line is "Understanding and simulating the world is a crucial aspect of building AGI". This model will be used for research and robotics, and maybe the training of further models.
Without getting into a larger argument about whether this is the correct approach to building AGI, I think its reasonable to ask people to engage with how this technology gets used in practice, besides its nominal purpose of "building AGI".
The predominant way people engage with this technology right now is through slop content in their instagram feeds.
(Btw I say all this as someone that has worked on generative models for 10 years).
Unironically, Tung Tung Tung Sahur and some funny music video about p(doom). But yeah that’s basically it.
Throw a gifted storyteller at any medium and they will produce something worth paying attention to. AI generated content has not had that moment yet. I'm not sure it will ever, but it's worth thinking about.
It took the medium of film ~50 years to find Hitchock and ~75 to find Spielberg.
I have thought about it.
I'm encouraging others to do the same and be honest with themselves about the direction we're headed.
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.
> "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.
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You must have a very narrow conception of sanity.
The future is coming by appointment only.
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Not insane at all, completely sensical.
> frontier technology
It's just a lame gimmick, this is not 2024 anymore, people have started to get sick of this AI thingie, especially when it comes to video/image generation. That Simon guy with his pelican is the exception that can only be seen on tech forums like this one.
As to why US (and probably also some Chinese) companies have started pouring hundreds of billions into AI-image generation is beyond my comprehension, but on the other hand I'm no economic genius.
No it’s not insane.
If I can’t realistically use it then I don’t care, especially when there’s no independent proof yet it works this well, given a cursory glance. If it trickles down into future developments I can use then cool, but it likely won’t because they want a moat. You don’t have to shield the poor defenseless multi-billion dollar megacorp from the genuine apathy they inspire.
If this is the best “frontier” they can achieve, then it’s no wonder they haven’t done anything groundbreaking in the space yet that produces practical results.
It's 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.
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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.
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I’ve decide that the best (and maybe only) way for me to interact with google AI models, is on the search results
It’s where I get the most value, and my expectations are very low, no attachment if it goes away
Of course they are mining me for data anyway, but they were doing that before already (and I do have a Gmail account, although I’ve almost completely stopped using Chrome - btw, it’s crazy that you can’t add plugins/extensions to Chrome on Guest mode)
I don't get how Google is so horrible at product. Let me play with this. Otherwise it's DOA.
That touches on the core reason not to get excited about these Google releases: They release something cool and then don't iterate on it. Instead they go off building another cool demo instead.
Gah. Go iterate. Listen to customers, adapt, iterate some more etc etc. That's how products are made.
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I'm not entirely convinced the new models aren't just a rollback to a clean training data state after the current model has been released for a while.
Alert me when these "world models" can make a video of a skateboarding line that fools a skateboarder.
And no, this didn't: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2K_OLiZ_RM
I watched all of that video, it was really good.
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.
This is a reflection of a complaint I frequently make about so called "world models". It's more accurate to call them video game models. They don't simulate the world, they simulate video games. For that reason a common issue with them is that the physics are video game physics rather than real world physics.
I'm sure you're probably right about video games being used in training and, as a result, the models reflecting video game physics: No air resistance, no static/dynamic friction curve, etc.
However, I don't think that's the problem in the example of the marble bust not toppling. It would have toppled in a video game engine as well; they model gravity and inertia just fine.
I think what's happening is the model isn't being a world model at all, it's being a language model. It's trying to make the "scripted" thing happen, and it probably "feels" like the script should end in the bust on the pedestal.
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It also failed to properly model the physics of knights riding wyverns into battle.
Which is fine for a video game. Not at all fine if you want to train robots with it. Trying to combine both use cases into a single model is doomed to failure IMO.
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People are arguing if the marble bust should've toppled over or not, completely missing the fact that marble is brittle and the bust would have surely cracked
How often do things in the real world not behave exactly as you expected them to?
I feeling I get from this is that this could be the mental model for a robot in the real world, continuously corrected by actual events.
We all have a world model in our heads of what we think is going to happen, we adjust quickly (or not) based on what does. This is pretty incredible stuff.
Busts rarely hang in midair at a 45° angle.
As an aside, why fall into the role of being an apologist for google-hype and Big Tech?
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> How often do things in the real world not behave exactly as you expected them to?
They wouldn't be called "Laws of Physics" if obeying them was optional. If your center of gravity is outside your base, you _will_ topple over. That's just how gravity works.
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I agree but I feel like the exaggerated physics were intentional and fitting with the video theme. If they had wanted it to topple, they wouldn't have posted the video.
They were demonstrating steering.
So what, the world model failed to model physics. The thing they said it did elsewhere. It's a valid critique
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 loop 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.
It's where (ex-)"AI luminaries" go to die. It's a way to make glacial, slow progress in the correct direction while never actually getting anywhere.
So we get to a point and people keep making complicated simulations of one kind or another ... and then someone (some model) 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.
It depends if the goal is a more accurate simulation, or if the goal is a tool for creatives to build games or content.
If it's the latter, I don't see a 'hole'.
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yes. I feel Google's video physics has always been bad. slow, aritifical, unnatural.
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.
I thought that was pretty cool.
But remember, today is the worst the models will ever be. I agree they are still safe though... they will probably use AI to make even more films faster and more creative since it enables them to do more.
It was the complete lack of fear or urgency on the part of the characters for me.
It was their eyeballs not drying out or squinting due to the wind for me.
Not that I have zero trust in anything AI related that Google demos, but the first video example on the right, the model completely ignores inputs towards the end.
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
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.
What if we're all in Genie 10 right now?
Isn't that a simpler explanation of reality than the zillions of particles all existing simultaneously in this massive universe?
Some sort of simple primal generative AI construct that just feeds a conscious experience for one. You. Nothing else is real. No one else is real.
Something like that would be an infinitely simpler, than running the physics and conscious experiences of this unimaginably large universe we think we're in.
Simplicity is only relevant to humans (and other animals that evolved into trying to forecast their survival). Most of the universe seems to prefer chaos. So no, from a universal perspective, there is no reason for reality to be simple or elegant.
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explains how fringe details don't make sense, like no one knowing what oracle does exactly
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Yeah 2020 was the upload point when we were all corralled during covid. And trees were the data centers of the dinosaurs. I mean, what if?
The models need to watch more Gallagher… cuz that watermelon smash was like a 2/10.
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"
Google is already public, has a larger more normie customer base, many products to integrate AI in with established enterprise accounts in the millions... For some reason theyre not valued at 50:1 revenue... I dont think all that many people are going to be that excited for Anthropic as a business, Its an escape hatch, using the public as exit liquidity while the founders can still make a 100bil.
The public is the final "greater fool".
If the checker clip is meant to be used to develop a robot to play checkers, then the physics is not remotely good enough. When the robot takes the first piece, the piece looks like it's moving up from the board, then suddenly doesn't. The last move also isn't valid checkers, unless I'm missing something -- the robot offers its piece to be eaten and the human doesn't take it.
A few years from now, Lydia in Skyrim will have a fully consistent personality with dynamic dialogue and full contextual memories of all our adventures together in Skyrim.
A visual makeover is great but what happens when millions of people fall in love with virtual characters who seem to deserve that love?
Question is if we even want that. Video games often are escapism, we want an illusion of reality but not actual reality. I mean there definitely is a market for that, but I don't think it's for everyone.
There was a comic book about comic books I read when I was young. I believe it was "Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art" - part of it dealt with what is gained and lost with realism.
In a nutshell, (with my memory of 30-40 years), the more and more realistic a scene becomes, the less the brain applies it to ourself. It becomes this definite place, definite person, rather than ourself or our surroundings projected into other characters.
All these scenes, that I guess are amazing, they all are creepy to me.
That actually sounds implementable even now! Except the fully consistent personality part. And maybe that's a good thing. Falling in love with beings without physical presence sounds agonizing; probably better spent on real people.
I imagine you could implement the fully consistent personality by putting a recurring dream about the player, followed by waking up, in Lydia's context at startup.
skyrim already has mods for AI chat with all of your followers. I haven't tried it but plenty of people use it, (in VR as well, of course).
man it really shows some of you have ai psychosis, nobody in the gaming world wants that, that's some wizard level virginity low even for gamers
> Google AI Ultra exclusive
> AI Ultra (and thus Genie) are not available for Workspace companies
Who is this for?
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 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.
Will that require same dev/coding harness and spec-kit-like engineering flow?
Like create a spec on how a movie will look like, feed contexts, create tasks so that multiple clips look congruent?
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.
Astonishing to me that a company like Google would be willing to publish such a terrible looking product demo. Interactive, but with completely made-up inputs that are ignored?
I think you're exactly right. This was already a problem with Genie 3, but they've appear to have gone all in on video generation over controllability.
The original Genie was a great piece of work with a real sense of purpose - to enable agents to learn about the real world in the way Dreamer or Schmidhuber's paper sketched. But now most of the people that drove that mission have left Deepmind (Jack Parker-Holder, Tim Rocktaschel, Demis) and it's become this instead.
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.
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Just as JPod by Douglas Coupland predicted.
When Google's epitaph is eventually written, PMs will figure prominently as the catalyst for the rapidly accelerating decline.
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.
Can't wait for the hyper-realistic customer service bots and deepfake propaganda videos.
I don't know. With each new release of these models, they compare side-by-side how they are better than the previous ones, but at the same time I feel less impressed by each new release. Somehow they manage to be a seemingly big step forward but at the same time I feel I have seen so much AI that I just look at the common failure modes and they are all still there.
It's easy for them to show demos of abstract things because they don't necessarily have to follow real-world rules, but anything modeled after real world falls short of expectations.
I would like to see how it breaks, don't spend all your focus on how nice it looks with specially curated shots. At least give a few examples of what happens when it breaks from running too long. They mention that it can fail under "Understanding current limitations" but don't show any examples. Especially since they mention the cases of safety and responsible use, it seems quite relevant to help prepare people by showing them some examples of how it can break and so you an learn to spot it.
Their posted videos show plenty of failures. Read the rest of the comment section.
In the first comparison of Genie 3 to Genie 4 it seems that:
- in Genie 4 the character's suit stopped making sense in the back where it now has a weird fold?
- the controls don't control the character even anymore as now its controlling some kid-height character in first person instead?
- Everything looks like Unreal Engine.
This does not look good.
"controlling" some kid-height character. the button-pressing seems almost frustrated with the lack of response, long holds with no (or opposite) change and sometimes mashing. are they supposed to be buttons a person pressed to direct it? or did it create those too?
I found it perplexing how the dragons shrank in size, or perhaps the castle turret in the background didn't shrink fast enough.
Either way, the sense of believability was rapidly (and smoothly) lost.
Again, very impressive from a technical point. But language is so flawed to do anything creative. It just turns out all looking the same and kind of boring
Looks like we are inching closer to on the fly open world game creation soon. While the updates excite me as a senior data scientist but as a human they all just look scary. Just me?
"Inching closer", yes. "Soon" seems presumptive. FSD everywhere seemed "soon" 20 years ago.
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.
We’ve come a long way from simulating a Unix file system in a GPT-3 prompt haven’t we?
Q: Is there a easy way for average people to recognize these live super-deep fakes?
I know I could run the content through a fingerprint detector. However, I'm a professional software engineer...not a normal user.
What's the ethical impact of this technology??
>Is there a easy way for average people to recognize these live super-deep fakes?
Almost all the AI gen videos I have seen have extremely weird camera movement when panning around, it usually just looks way too smooth/uncanny.
The non-coherence of the world is a pretty solid tell. Any time the camera pans away and then back, the scene changes. The model doesn't remember what used to be there dozens of frames ago and so it invents something new.
The future of movies will be promising.
[1]: https://www.minid.net/2026/8/2/the-actor-was-the-expensive-p...
Thank you for that article, it was a great laugh.
You are a shell of a human being.
What is the point of this vs cheap robotic arm simulations?
The only place I see this applicable is for visual artists prototyping
Humans interact with their environment by subconsciously simulating it and predicting what will happen in the next few moments. This ability gives us the capacity to work more efficiently and reliably in any environment. These world models will serve a similar purpose to the AI and robotic systems of tomorrow. This is a foundational piece.
We don't have to fall off a cliff to learn to drive on a mountain road, we can imagine the consequences for cheaper. If we didn't have imagination life would be much more dangerous.
You could produce a thousand cheap ads for your product or one expensive real ad.
Podcasting is going through the thousand cheap ads with the obnoxiously inserted interstitial ads. What they have accomplished is me unsubscribing to the worst offending podcast and beginning the journey of ad blocking on podcast with the help of whisper and LLMs. Also now I hate Shopify with the heat of a 1000 burning suns due to their obnoxious ads and the insane rate they get played.
So yea that one expensive ad would probably have a positive impact compared to a tidal wave of slop. Quality > Quantity after all.
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.
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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.
I guess they used Genie 4 to make a video about people using Genie 4 in different contexts. This may have some implications.
> "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.
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>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?
Techincally, isn't the less expensive sub for Gemini Ultra £75 p/m?
>audio-like music
My favorite kind of music.
A nit, but given that this is from a major corporation, and LLMs are supposed to be em-dash-happy, it's surprising (disappointing?) that the announcement uses:
> audio-like music
That's a hyphen. What's "audio-like music" -- music that is almost sound but not quite? Music made from raw audio? :-)
Yeah, I think that sentence was supposed to be: Genie 4 is natively multimodal, enabling audio--like music, ambient noises, and interactive dialogue--to be simultaneously generated with the world.
That's a proper use of a hyphen though, an emdash would be wrong.
But it's not, unless you know what "audio-like music" is?
I don't think so, and in fact an em dash would be much less confusing.
audio, e.g. music
audio — like music
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> Genie 4 is natively multimodal, enabling audio-like music, ambient noises, and interactive dialogue to be simultaneously generated with the world.
Looks like a hiccup, which created an odd and ambiguous sentence.
There used to be editors who would read press releases to catch this.
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
again only available in trusted research preview.
The playable element is cool PR but the news is that endless synthetic training data for embodied AI models is basically here or close.
And their most impactful application will be training smaller models for military drones to detect, target and kill humans. sigh...
Every time I'm about to be excited about AI the cynic in me slaps me back to reality. I imagine the endless possibilities of AI for disabled people, then realize that it's going to leave millions of people disabled instead.
It will probably do both
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.
Neuralink integration and I'm out of here.
Can someone ELI5 how this "Leads to AGI"? I can kind of understand some sort of "theory of mind" going on here, but how would having a complex world model enable, say, an AGI that could file my taxes for me?
AGI is a loaded phrase these days. But if we focus on how it will improve the quality of training data for LLMs, I can prob talk about that.
Right now LLMs only have text, images, and videos to train from. Anything it understands about physics is from an abstract level. It's like learning how to calculate throwing a baseball before you've ever even thrown a baseball. Imagine having to learn force = mass x acceleration before you've even picked up a ball.
What this world generation Google is doing appears to be something Nvidia has spoken about too. Letting LLMs/AI learn from a world physics simulation. Meaning LLMs having the opportunity to "experience" physics, the same way you intuitively know how to throw a ball after attempting a few times yourself.
If an LLM can better understand how our real world works the quality of its output improves -- theoretically.
As far as your taxes go, you can create an intelligent workflow right now to do that for you. Don't need AGI for that.
what good in the world could possibly come from this being available? did anyone working on this ever think about that?
The creation of shareholder value. Much has been thought about it.
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.
Looks cool....
Showing off an anglo-bias with the Japanese train station in the 1980s, with a man speaking english.
Infinite Tsukuyomi is coming soon…
If only there was some way we could create some sort of arrangement of 3D models and place a virtual camera within the arrangement. We could introduce some physics simulation and make the position of the virtual camera move and render what it sees to the user.
If such a system were possible, it seems like it would be far better at consistency and realism, since it could be fine tuned and hand crafted to best represent the desired world. It could be used to make interactive experiences, games, perhaps even feature films!
Alas.
It looks sooo boring and generic that it's hard for me to imagine anyone thought https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFfPkUJd_Jk is a good showcase.
Honestly MiniMax H3 looks better than this at most of the things I've been able to generate locally. These look super AAA game like - movement is uncanny and feels like it was trained on GTA3 or something like that - is this just me?
all the things you've dreamt of - your vivid dreams - now you can replay them.
for all the a.i misery with hardware prices i.e ram.
such a wonderful world we live in now.
Wow, wow! What a treat! Such a fascinating time to be alive. Talk about fast feedback loops! This is pretty quick loops for trying out ideas!
I'm very impressed!
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?
That all sounds right to me, but apparently they can also be used for simply generating videos, or "unlocking the creation of new interactive experiences"... which both seem like competing goals with everything you just mentioned.
WERE NOT IN A SIMULATION! YAY!
The third video is proof that v4 can, ekhm, walk slower?
This should not exist.
Why do we need this? No thank you. We don't need flying cars and more vendor lock in. We need to serve the current google within constraints. That should be driving direction. Being a better ecosystem member. Another fascist product from google.
I am again so disappointed with the discourse about AI in these threads. It rarely if ever focuses on anything remotely technical. People just trot out their agenda and their opinions (much like what I am doing now). We are building civilization level tools and the most technical analysis I see is that the blog post announcing it was written by an LLM (it wasn't) or that an ogre riding a unicorn into the clouds of Venus was missing a claw (wth?).
Yah, meta is discouraged here but why are we as a community putting up with this level of meta disruption? I guess I'm supposed to adapt to the new community but there's nothing there there.
I will stick with the more technical posts here and avoid anything to do with a new AI model and the complete and shocking thoughtlessness of the commenters (most of them).
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This is part of analyzing model output against others and known capabilities. The Orge riding a bike is just a QA test. Maybe you can work on civilization level testing tools.
I didn't see any comments related to that - now I understand. Your reply does not seem to be in good faith, then you pick on the poster not the message.
Who wants this
Good moving toward open world:)
Why are they plowing money into this garbage? I don't understand it. I guess it is because Google is lagging behind in the AI race but the roi of this bs must be close to zero. Clowns.
Is anyone actually making any games with these tools? Like, can I play one on Steam or something?
So if those genie 4 characters have all individual chain of thought reasoning and persistent retrospection / recollection, how do these human characters know they are not living in a simulation made by biological humans? Not sure you understand what i'm getting at. Some ethical questions do arise.
The implications for what we now call video games are crazy.
It’s going to be bizarre when we’re all playing slightly different versions of the same game together.
It could be even weirder. We might be playing video games that are essentially built from the ground up by and for the individual gamer, such that the concept of a "game", let alone the same game, doesn't even make sense. Same for what we have called movies and TV for the last 100 years.
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Failure modes?
Show them or I'll assume this is pure marketing.
You know you can already use previous versions of Genie and they look pretty damn close to this right?
im realy excited for this
If it’s not open weights, no one should care.
It doesn’t matter how impressive your demo is if it takes a literal data center to run.
Actual innovation can’t be seen at the let’s just throw money at it level. But, it can be seen at the that’s cool. I can run it on my laptop level.
Hi, I always loved watching Pixar movies, partly because I knew that what took them days to render (in their literal data center) would eventually be done in real-time on my desktop.
In the same way, seeing that something is possible gives hope to the people who are making those open models that you want.
What the fuck are the little wasd/arrow keys supposed to mean? They have no relationship to the movement of the character or the camera. It's just flashing buttons.
Why can't Google just announce something and release at the same day, not always this stupid wait list stuff.
wait list, then it releases, and you get 10 api requests *per day*.
Until you've spend $100-150 on their platform. Then you get 250 per day until you spend $2000 and it becomes properly unlimited.
It is really annoying. I'm literally trying to pay you for a service and you won't let me.
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.
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?
supper cool
"Building world models responsibly"
... I'm suddenly reminded of Iain M Banks' "Surface Detail".
Impressive slop. But slop nonetheless.
But to what end? How does this help humanity? How does this help us encounter truth and beauty? Whether you look at this from a utilitarian angle or from a transcendental one, it is a collosal waste of time, energy, and money.
“audio-like music”
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.
i am starting to get model fatigue..
this is the gta6 I am was hoping for
pretty cool !
Not really impressive at all at this point. That dragon clip was pretty awful. If you told me this page was from 2024 I’d believe you.
why does this need to exist?
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.
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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.
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Typos mean the text came from a human.
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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.
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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)
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None of this makes sense. Think of the economics involved here: is it cheaper to run tens/hundreds of thousands of GPU clusters to simulate a unique game world for millions of players, or would it be cheaper to just write the god damn code once, and then host it for download, or to allow them to be streamed?
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.
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Geforce Now is still a thing
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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?
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, and absolutely none of it is algorithmic. World models, as complex as they are, are still just pushing numbers around on paper.
Even if we can show that it is technically possible to model a universe like ours to the degree that our current perception of reality suggests exists, there are three other big factors that would need to be weighed:
Is it feasible? What Dyson sphere level of power would be needed to maintain such a simulation? Is that level of energy available to whomever is running the simulation?
Is there a positive ROI? What does this advanced civilization get out of running such an expensive simulation?
Is it moral? The simulation involves sentient creatures who are capable of deeply contemplating their own existence, capable of feeling rapturous pleasure and indescribable pain and loss, and ostensibly capable of making moral choices that range from heroic to depraved. Doesn't there come a point where the beings in a simulation are so close to the beings in "base reality" that the same moral principles apply? If you press a button that kicks off a simulation where humans can torture and murder each other, behaving essentially identically to humans in "base reality," aren't you in some sense facilitating those deaths?
> What Dyson sphere level of power would be needed to maintain such a simulation
Why would you assume energy is relevant to whoever turned on our simulation? If I created a simulation where the only source of energy was cotton candy, my creations might ask "but where would our creator even get enough cotton candy to run a simulation like this", not realize that it's absurd to think that the creator of a simulation has any of the same constraints that exist inside the simulation.
You basically described the plot of World on a Wire.
You run it to see if your military tactics will defeat the enemy and then you keep running it until you find a strategy that guarantees victory. Who cares if some sim lives are churned through the simulation, our lives are at stake!
Reductionist but I feel like that’s how it would go.
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
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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.