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Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds

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Re: Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds

#51

The actual breakthrough with Genie is being able to turn around and look back, and seeing the same scene that was there before. A few other labs have similar world simulators, but they all struggle badly with keeping coherence of things not in view. Hence why they always walk forwards and never look around.

[deleted]

Re: Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds

#52
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.

Re: Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LeCun wasn't producing results. He was obstinate and insistent on his own theories and ideas which weren't, and possibly aren't, going anywhere. He refused to engage with LLMs and compete in the market that exists, and spent all his effort and energy on unproven ideas and research, which split the company's mission and competitiveness. They lost their place as one of the top 4 AI companies, and are now a full generat…

Were you there or just an attentive outsider?

Most serious researchers want to work on interesting problems like reinforcement learning or robotics or RNN or dozen other avant-garde subjects. None want to work on "boring" LLM technology, requiring significant engineering effort and huge dataset wrangling effort.

Re: Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds

#54
post #10

I have been confused for a long time why FB is not motivated enough to invest in world models, it IS the key to unblock their "metaverse" vision. And instead they let go Yann LeCun.

You are beyond correct. World models is what saves their Reality Labs investment. I would say if Reality Labs cannot productize World Models, then that entire project needs to be scrapped.

Re: Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds

#55
post #50

I have no idea why Google is wasting their time with this. Trying to hallucinate an entire world is a dead-end. There will never be enough predictability in the output for it to be cohesive in any meaningful way, by design. Why are they not training models to help write games instead? You wouldn't have to worry about permanence and consistency at all, since they would be enforced by the code, like all games today. Lo…

Take the positive spin. What if you could put in all the inputs and it can simulate real world scenarios you can walk through to benefit mankind e.g disaster scenarios, events, plane crashes, traffic patterns. I mean there's a lot of useful applications for it. I don't like the framing at this time, but I also get where it's going. The engineer in me is drawn to it, but the Muslim in me is very scared to hear anyone…

> What if you could put in all the inputs and it can simulate real world scenarios you can walk through to benefit mankind e.g disaster scenarios, events, plane crashes, traffic patterns.

This is only a useful premise if it can do any of those things accurately, as opposed to dreaming up something kinda plausible based on an amalgamation of every vaguely related YouTube video.

Re: Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds

#56

I have no idea why Google is wasting their time with this. Trying to hallucinate an entire world is a dead-end. There will never be enough predictability in the output for it to be cohesive in any meaningful way, by design. Why are they not training models to help write games instead? You wouldn't have to worry about permanence and consistency at all, since they would be enforced by the code, like all games today. Lo…

Imo they explain pretty well what they are trying to achieve with SIMA and Genie in the Google Deepmind Podcast[1]. They see it as the way to get to AGI by letting AI agents learn for themselves in simulated worlds. Kind of like how they let AlphaGo train for Go in an enormous amount of simulated games.

[1] https://youtu.be/n5x6yXDj0uo

Re: Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds

#57
post #46

The more of this I see the more I want to spend time away from screens and doing those things I love to do in the real world.

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

Re: Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds

#58
post #9

What’s the endgame here? For a small gaming studio, what are the actual implications?

The endgame has nothing to do with gaming.

The goal of world models like Genie is to be a way for AI and robots to "imagine" things. Then, they could practice tasks inside of the simulated world or reason about actions by simulating their outcome.

Re: Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds

#60

I have no idea why Google is wasting their time with this. Trying to hallucinate an entire world is a dead-end. There will never be enough predictability in the output for it to be cohesive in any meaningful way, by design. Why are they not training models to help write games instead? You wouldn't have to worry about permanence and consistency at all, since they would be enforced by the code, like all games today. Lo…

An hybrid approach could maybe work, have a more or less standard game engine for coherence and use this kind of generative AI more or less as a short term rendering and physics sim engine.
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