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Genie 2: A large-scale foundation world model

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Re: Genie 2: A large-scale foundation world model

#61
What is actually of value here? There's no actual game, it's incredibly expensive to compute, the behavior is erratic.. It's cool because it's new - but that will quickly wear off, and once that's gone, what's left? There's insane amounts of money being spent on this, and for what?

Re: Genie 2: A large-scale foundation world model

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Progress is not linear. For all we know, in 2027 things will slow down to a virtual halt for the next 30 years. Look at how much big science progressed in the first 20 years of the 19th century/20th century and look how little it has progressed in the first 20 years of this century. We are on the downlow compared to the last centuries and even if you look at crisp or deep learning, they are not as impactful NOW as le…

The things you list for previous centuries aren't limited to the first 20 years

19th century: electromagnetism, the voltaic pile, the double slit experiment for the light wave theory

20th century: general/special relativity, radioactive decay, discovery of the electron

21st century: crisp and deep learning

Hard to argue that the big science of the first 20 years of the previous century looks way more impact than crisp and deep learning put TOGETHER.

Re: Genie 2: A large-scale foundation world model

#63
post #33
post #13

Related recent project you can try out yourself (Chrome only) which hallucinates new frames of a Minecraft style game: https://oasis.decart.ai/ That one would reimagine the world any time you look at the sky or ground. Sounds like Genie2 solves that: "Genie 2 is capable of remembering parts of the world that are no longer in view and then rendering them accurately when they become observable again."

This blows Decart's Oasis (which raised $25 million at $500 million valuation) and World Labs (which raised $230 million in complete stealth) out of the water. Google is firing warning shots to kill off interest in funding competing startups in this space. I suspect that in 6 months it won't matter as we'll have completely open source Chinese world models. They're already starting to kill video foundation model compa…

I strongly suspect that like open ai and O1, for profit companies are going to start locking down whatever advances they find.

There is still an enormous amount of long hanging fruit that anyone can harvest right now, but eventually big advances are going to require big budgets and I can only imagine how technically tight lipped they will be with those.

Re: Genie 2: A large-scale foundation world model

#67
post #33
post #13

Related recent project you can try out yourself (Chrome only) which hallucinates new frames of a Minecraft style game: https://oasis.decart.ai/ That one would reimagine the world any time you look at the sky or ground. Sounds like Genie2 solves that: "Genie 2 is capable of remembering parts of the world that are no longer in view and then rendering them accurately when they become observable again."

This blows Decart's Oasis (which raised $25 million at $500 million valuation) and World Labs (which raised $230 million in complete stealth) out of the water. Google is firing warning shots to kill off interest in funding competing startups in this space. I suspect that in 6 months it won't matter as we'll have completely open source Chinese world models. They're already starting to kill video foundation model compa…

> The game theory here is that if you're a foundation model "company", you're dead - big tech will kill you. You don't have a product, and you're paying a lot to do research that isn't necessarily tied to customer demand.

Basically, the foundation model companies are outsourced R&D labs for big tech. They can be kept at arms length (like OpenAI with Microsoft and Anthropic with Amazon) or be bought outright (like Inflection, although that was a weird one).

Both OpenAI and Anthropic are trying to move away from being pure model companies.

> If you're a leading AI research+product company, everyone else will release their code/research to create a thousand competitors to you.

Trillion dollar question - is there a competitive edge / moat in vertical integration in AI? Apple proved there was in hardware + os (which were unbundled in wintel times). For AI, right now, I can't see one, but I'm just a random internet comentator, who knows.

Re: Genie 2: A large-scale foundation world model

#68
post #14

Genuine question: What is the point of telling us about this if we can’t use it? Is it just to flex on everyone?

The best minds of a generation went from thinking about how to make people click ads to how to generate 3d video game worlds.

The best minds of the generation are on wall street trying to figure out how to quickly spot inefficiently priced options 1% more often.

Seriously, I wish more than anything I was kidding.

Re: Genie 2: A large-scale foundation world model

#69
post #61

What is actually of value here? There's no actual game, it's incredibly expensive to compute, the behavior is erratic.. It's cool because it's new - but that will quickly wear off, and once that's gone, what's left? There's insane amounts of money being spent on this, and for what?

[deleted]

Re: Genie 2: A large-scale foundation world model

#70
These clips feels like watching someone dream in real time. Particularly the door ones, where the environment changes in wild fashion, or the middle NPC one, where you see a character walk into shadow and mostly disappear and a different character walks out.
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