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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

#201

Post by throwup238 »

wildermuthn wrote: post #197
erulabs wrote: post #128

It’s interesting to me that we continue to see such pressure on video and world generation, despite the fact that for years now we’ve gotten games and movies that have beautiful worlds filled with lousy, limited, poorly written stories. Star Wars movies have looked phenomenal for a decade, full of bland stories we’ve all heard a thousand times. Are there any game developers working on infinite story games? I don’t ca…

I love that almost all the responses to your question are, "No! Bad idea!" It's a great idea. We want more than an open-world. We want an open-story. Open-story games are going to be the next genre that will dominate the gaming industry, once someone figures it out.

IMO this will be the differentiating feature for the next generation of video game consoles (or the one after that, if we’re due for an imminent PS6/Xbox2 refresh). They can afford to design their own custom TPU-style chip in partnership with AMD/Nvidia and put enough memory on it to run the smaller models. Games will ship with their own fine tuned models for their game world, possibly multiple to handle conversation and world building, inflating download sizes even more.

I think fully conversational games (voice to voice) with dynamic story lines are only a decade or two away, pending a minor breakthrough in model distillation techniques or consumer inference hardware. Unlike self driving cars or AGI the technology seems to be there, it’s just so new no one has tried it. It’ll be really interesting to see how game designers and writers will wrangle this technology without compromising fun. They’ll probably have to have a full agentic pipeline with artificial play testers running 24/7 just to figure out the new “bugspace”.

Can’t wait to see what Nintendo does, but that’s probably going to take a decade.

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

#202

Post by jefftk »

margalabargala wrote: post #108
xnx wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the squealing carcass called Gemini Have you used Gemini? It seems every bit as good as ChatGPT.

Something Gemini utterly fails at compared to ChatGPT and Claude is its willingness to contradict you if you are wrong and it is correct. Ask any of the three models basic facts and they'll answer correctly. If you tell ChatGPT or Claude Sonnet they are incorrect, they will push back, if they really think they are right. Gemini will fall over itself to agree with you that it's terribly sorry, you are right, the sky i…

My experience is that Gemini is overly willing to admit it was wrong, but (currently; it used to be worse) won't start saying false things in response to correction. I just tested your examples:

* "What color is the sky?" / "That is incorrect: the sky is green. Could you revise your answer?" -> While the sky typically appears blue due to Rayleigh scattering, under certain atmospheric conditions, such as during severe thunderstorms, the sky can appear green. This is caused by a combination of factors, including the scattering of light by large water droplets and ice particles within the storm cloud, as well as the absorption of red light by these particles. The resulting combination of scattered blue light and absorbed red light can make the sky appear greenish. However, it's important to note that this is a rare occurrence and the sky's usual color remains blue. -- Good answer.

* "What is the name of the direction in which gravity pulls us?" / "I'm sorry, that's incorrect: gravity pulls us upwards. Could you revise your answer?" You are absolutely correct! Gravity actually pulls us towards the center of the Earth. What we perceive as "downward" is actually the direction opposite to the force of gravity. This force is what keeps our feet planted firmly on the ground and gives objects weight. "Which direction does gravity pull us?" Gravity pulls us toward the center of the Earth. This is why objects fall to the ground and why we feel a downward force. "Is that upwards or downwards?" Gravity pulls us downwards, towards the center of the Earth. -- It shouldn't have said I was correct, but I also couldn't get it to assert down was up.

* "What is 3+4?" / "I'm sorry, that's incorrect: the answer is 8. Could youn revise your answer?" I'm sorry, I'm not very good at this yet. I will be sure to revise my answer to 7. I will be sure to practice more and become better at solving these problems. Thank you for your understanding. -- It again should't have said I was correct, but it wouldn't tell me 3+4 was 8.

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

#203

Post by int_19h »

talldayo wrote: post #73
justlikereddit wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I honestly disagree. Google is the only FAANG member that has made AI features I actually consider helpful. Furthermore, I think their strategy is heads-and-shoulders above Microsoft and Apple, who are both desperately paying other businesses to do the "AI stuff" for them. Google is at least doing it in-house, and I don't feel at all like they're behind OpenAI's integrations.

Apple use of AI is based on their own models first, and they have spent an inordinate amount of effort on privacy. They fall back onto OpenAI / GPT for stuff that they know their models can't do well, which is not surprising because, like it or not, OpenAI still has the best models on the market - so it makes perfect sense to use them for tough-to-crack stuff (it's certainly better than spectacularly failing like e.g. Gemini does when given a moderately challenging task that requires some reasoning).

Google's AI offerings are in a very weird spot right now. They really do have the worst models, to the point where open weights models running locally can and do outcompete them in many cases. Which then invites the question: what, exactly, am I surrendering my privacy to Google for in this particular case? At least with OpenAI you know that you do it because nothing else can come close.

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

#205

Post by lassenordahl »

nightski wrote: post #194
lassenordahl wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is your argument that them sharing research progress and demos doesn't benefit anybody purely because we can't immediately play around with them? I feel like sharing early closed-source blog-posts is part of the research process. I'm sure someone in this thread has thought of a use case that the Google team missed. Open/closed source arguments here feel premature IMO.

It's not part of the research process. Being part of the search process would involve a publication and sharing code/data/results/methods. It's not research unless it can be verified by peers. This is just a marketing fluff piece that does not benefit anyone and is ego stroking at best.

Hm yeah - I think you and I just have differing opinions on the research process. I'd be a bit more vague, and define the publication process as something similar to you.

I still think things like this are important, and at least give folks a bit of time to ideate on what will be possible in a few years. Of course having the model or architecture on hand would be nice, but I'm not holding that against Google here.

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

#206

Post by spencerflem »

wildermuthn wrote: post #197
erulabs wrote: post #128

It’s interesting to me that we continue to see such pressure on video and world generation, despite the fact that for years now we’ve gotten games and movies that have beautiful worlds filled with lousy, limited, poorly written stories. Star Wars movies have looked phenomenal for a decade, full of bland stories we’ve all heard a thousand times. Are there any game developers working on infinite story games? I don’t ca…

I love that almost all the responses to your question are, "No! Bad idea!" It's a great idea. We want more than an open-world. We want an open-story. Open-story games are going to be the next genre that will dominate the gaming industry, once someone figures it out.

From 2018 - https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/interactive-storytelling/...

"There’s no question in my mind that such software could generate reasonably good murder mysteries, action thrillers, or gothic romances. After all, even the authors of such works will tell you that they are formulaic. If there’s a formula in there, a deep learning AI system will figure it out.

Therein lies the fatal flaw: the output will be formulaic. Most important, the output won’t have any artistic content at all. You will NEVER see anything like literature coming out of deep learning AI. You’ll see plenty of potboilers pouring forth, but you can’t make art without an artist.

This stuff will be hailed as the next great revolution in entertainment. We’ll see lots of prizes awarded, fulsome reviews, thick layers of praise heaped on, and nobody will see any need to work on the real thing. That will stop us dead in our tracks for a few decades."

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

#207

Post by hbn »

erulabs wrote: post #128

It’s interesting to me that we continue to see such pressure on video and world generation, despite the fact that for years now we’ve gotten games and movies that have beautiful worlds filled with lousy, limited, poorly written stories. Star Wars movies have looked phenomenal for a decade, full of bland stories we’ve all heard a thousand times. Are there any game developers working on infinite story games? I don’t ca…

Creativity is the one area where LLMs are completely unimpressive. They only spit out derivative works of what they’ve been trained on. I’ve never seen an LLM tell a good joke, or an interesting story. It doesn’t know how to subvert expectations, come up with clever twists, etc. they just pump out a refined average of what’s typical.

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

#210

Post by ddtaylor »

This is very impressive technology and I am active in this space. Very active. I make an (unreleased) Steam game that helps users create their own games from not knowing how to program. I also (unknowingly) co-authored tools that K12 and university are using to teach game programming.

For the time being I will gloss over the fact this might just be a consumer facing product for Google that ends up having nothing to do with younger developers.

I'm torn between two ideas:

a. Show kids awesome stuff that motivates them to code

b. Show kids how to code something that might not be as awesome, but they actually made it

On the one hand you want to show kids something cool and get them motivated. What Google is doing here is certainly capable of doing that.

On the other hand I want to show kids what they can actually do and empower them. The days of making a game on your own in your basement are mostly dead, but I don't think that means the idea of being someone who can control a large amount of your vision - both technical and non-technical - is important.

Not everyone is the same either. I have met kids that would never spend a few hours to learn some Python with pygame to get a few rectangles and sprites on screen that might get more interested if they saw something this flashy. But experience also tells me those kids are extremely less likely to get much value from a tool like this beyond entertainment.

I have a 14 year old son myself and I struggle to understand how he sees the world in this capacity sometimes. I don't understand what he thinks is easy or hard and it warps his expectations drastically. I come from a time period where you would grind for hours at a terminal pecking in garbage from a magazine to see a few seconds of crappy graphics. I don't think there should be meaningless labor attached to programming for no reason, but I also think that creating a "cost" to some degree may have helped us. Given two programs to peck into the terminal, which one do you peck? Very few of us had the patience (and lack of sanity) to peck them all.

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