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Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds

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Re: Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds

#281
Can't wait to have a game that can be an all-in-one game: rpg, roleplaying, rts, space, orcs, magic, cyberworlds with infinite story lines/worlds, items, dialogs etc. Ready Player One vibes.

Like I want to take my skyrim character, drop it into Diablo 2, then drop Diablo (the demon) into Need for Speed, then have my need for speed car show up on another planet and upgrade it into a space ship, while the space ship takes me to fight some mega aliens. All while offering a coherent & unique experience. As you play, the game saves major forks in your story & game genre, so you can invite/share your game recipe with other humans to enjoy.

Also, when are we getting a new Spore game? This game is a sleeping giant waiting to be awaken.

Re: Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love AI but I also hope it will paradoxically make people realize the value of real life experiences and human relationships.

It won't. This is digital heroin of the purest kind. The reason we've never heard from any alien species is that they invented this technology and then the entire population disappeared into their goonspheres and never emerged. Quite how they stopped a line forming three decks long outside every holodeck on the Enterprise is a mystery to me.

> Quite how they stopped a line forming three decks long outside every holodeck on the Enterprise is a mystery to me.

You probably need captain approval for NSFW content. I wonder if there will ever be an AI service that is not "Enterprise" filtered.

Re: Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds

#283
post #167

Now I can't stop thinking about _The Experience Machine_ by Andy Clark. It theorizes that this is how humans navigate and experience the real world: Our brains generate what we think the world around is like and our senses don't so much directly process visual information but instead act like a kind of loss function for our internal simulations. Then we use that error to update our internal model of the world. In thi…

This is easily corroborated by taking hallucinogens. Your subjective experience is a simulation, augmented by your senses. Personally I often catch myself making reading mistakes and knowing for a fact that the mistake wasn't just conceptual, but an actual visual error where my brain renders the wrong word. Sometimes it's very obvious because the effect will last for seconds before my vision "snaps" back into reality…

Just want to say this is a really good description of our brain's simulation, and I have experienced the same catching-the-misread-word phenomenon, and it's a subtle reminder about how this is all working. But does this mean our wires are crossed in a particular way that is uncommon? I haven't heard others share a similar experience.

Re: Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you seeing people do with it? To my eyes everyone is in the same amount of meetings lol.

For one, since last month, AI is writing about 95% of my code and that of my colleagues. I just describe what I want and how it should be implemented and the AI takes care of all the details, solves bugs, configuration issues, etc. Also I use it to research libraries, dig into documentation (and then write implementations based on that), discuss architectural alternatives, etc. Non-developers I know use them to organ…

> You really need to be obstinate in your convictions if you can dismiss LLMs at the time when everyone's job is being turned around by them.

I'm factual. You are the one with the extraordinary claim that LLMs will find new substantial markets/go through transformative breakthrough.

> Everywhere I look, everyone I talk to, is using LLMs

And everywhere I look, I don't. It might be the case that you stand right in the middle of an LLMs niche. Never did I say that one doesn't exist or that LLMs are inadequate at parroting existing code.

> Non-developers I know use them […]

among those are:

- things that have nothing to do with LLMs/AI

- things that you should NOT use LLMs for the reason that they will give you confidently wrong and/or random answers (because it's not in their training data/cut-off window, it's non-public information, they don't have the computing abilities to produce meaningful results)

- things that are low-value/low-stakes for which people won't be willing to pay for when asked to

> The list of uses is endless

no, it is not

> And I'm only talking of work-related usage

and we will get to see rather sooner than later how much business actually value LLMs when the real costs will be finally passed on to them.

Re: Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds

#285
post #167

Now I can't stop thinking about _The Experience Machine_ by Andy Clark. It theorizes that this is how humans navigate and experience the real world: Our brains generate what we think the world around is like and our senses don't so much directly process visual information but instead act like a kind of loss function for our internal simulations. Then we use that error to update our internal model of the world. In thi…

This is one of my fundamental beliefs about the nature of consciousness. We are never able to interact with the physical world directly, we first perceive it and then interpret those perceptions. More often than not, our interpretation ignores and modifies those perceptions, so we really are just living in a world created by our own mental chatter. This is one of the core tenets of Buddhism, and it's also expounded o…

This is absolutely what happens. It's even more tricky since our sensory inputs have different latencies which the brain must compile back into something consistent. While doing so it interprets and filters out a lot of unsurprising, expected data.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo_e0EvEZn8

Re: Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is easily corroborated by taking hallucinogens. Your subjective experience is a simulation, augmented by your senses. Personally I often catch myself making reading mistakes and knowing for a fact that the mistake wasn't just conceptual, but an actual visual error where my brain renders the wrong word. Sometimes it's very obvious because the effect will last for seconds before my vision "snaps" back into reality…

Just want to say this is a really good description of our brain's simulation, and I have experienced the same catching-the-misread-word phenomenon, and it's a subtle reminder about how this is all working. But does this mean our wires are crossed in a particular way that is uncommon? I haven't heard others share a similar experience.

I'm not sure. At times I've wondered if I have something similar to dyslexia. There are few common failure modes with me such as flipping consonants or vowels between adjacent words, or writing down a word and it being the wrong one.

My brain seems to store/recall words phonetically, possibly because I taught myself to read at age 3 with my own phonetic approach, but also possibly due to how I trained myself out of a long spell of aphasia during high school by consciously relearning how to speak in a way that engaged the opposite hemisphere of my brain; thinking in pitches, intonation, rhyme, rhythm, etc. and turning speaking into a musical expression. I'd read about this technique and after months of work I managed to make it work for me. So in that aspect, there really might be some crossed wires out of necessity.

I was homeless in high school and thus too poor to visit doctors and get scans done, so I'm really not sure if the assumed damage to my left hemisphere which I experienced was temporary or permanent, or even detectable. The aphasia was coupled with years of intense depersonalization and derealization as well. The brain is a very strange thing and many events in my life such as the ones described above have only reinforced to me how subjective my experience really is.

Re: Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds

#287

Everyone here seems too caught up in the idea that Genie is the product, and that its purpose is to be a video game, movie, or VR environment. That is not the goal. The purpose of world models like Genie is to be the "imagination" of next-generation AI and robotics systems: a way for them to simulate the outcomes of potential actions in order to inform decisions.

Creating robots for an imaginary universe? Who needs those

Re: Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds

#288
post #167

Now I can't stop thinking about _The Experience Machine_ by Andy Clark. It theorizes that this is how humans navigate and experience the real world: Our brains generate what we think the world around is like and our senses don't so much directly process visual information but instead act like a kind of loss function for our internal simulations. Then we use that error to update our internal model of the world. In thi…

This is one of my fundamental beliefs about the nature of consciousness. We are never able to interact with the physical world directly, we first perceive it and then interpret those perceptions. More often than not, our interpretation ignores and modifies those perceptions, so we really are just living in a world created by our own mental chatter. This is one of the core tenets of Buddhism, and it's also expounded o…

“ This is one of my fundamental beliefs about the nature of consciousness. We are never able to interact with the physical world directly, we first perceive it and then interpret those perceptions. More often than not, our interpretation ignores and modifies those perceptions, so we really are just living in a world created by our own mental chatter.”

This is an orthodox position in modern philosophy, dating back to at least Locke, strengthened by Kant and Schopenhauer. It’s held up to scrutiny for the past ~400 years.

But really it’s there in Plato too, so 2300+ years. And maybe further back

Re: Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds

#290

Reminds me of this [1] HN post from 9 months ago, where the author trained a neural network to do world emulation from video recordings of their local park — you can walk around in their interactive demo [2]. I don't have access to the DeepMind demo, but from the video it looks like it takes the idea up a notch. (I don't know the exact lineage of these ideas, but a general observation is that it's a shame that it's t…

I was immediately struck when I looked down at just the boardwalk how similar it felt to being on LSD. I am continually astounded with how similar these systems end up seeming to how our brain works. May just be happy coincidences but I am pretty sold on there being true parallels that will only become more and more apparent.
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