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Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds
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Re: Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds
#72I 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.
What's the use? Current scientific models clearly showing natural disasters and how to prevent them are being ignored. Hell, ignoring scientific consensus is a fantastic political platform.
Re: Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds
#73I keep on repeating myself, but it feels like I'm living in the future. Can't wait to hook this up to my old Oculus glasses and let Genie create a fully realistic sailing simulator for me, where I can train sailing with realistic conditions. On boats I'd love to sail. If making games out of these simulations work, it't be the end for a lot of big studios, and might be the renaissance for small to one person game stud…
> If making games out of these simulations work, it't be the end for a lot of big studios, and might be the renaissance for small to one person game studios.
I mean, if making a game eventually boils down to cooking a sufficient prompt (which to be clear, I'm not talking about text, these prompts are probably going to be more like video databases) then I'm not sure if it will be a renaissance for "one person game studios" any more than AI image generation has been a renaissance for "one person artists".
I want to be optimistic but it's hard to deny the massive distribution stranglehold that media publishing landscape has, and that has nothing to do with technology.
Re: Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds
#74I 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…
> Why are they not training models to help write games instead?
| It simulates physics and interactions for dynamic worlds, while its breakthrough consistency enables the simulation of any real-world scenario — from robotics and modelling animation and fiction, to exploring locations and historical settings.
Same with Nvidia's Earth 2 and Cosmos (and a bit like Isaac). Games or VR environments are not the primary drive, the primary drive is training robots (including non-humanoids, such as Waymo) and just getting the data. It's exactly because of this that perfect physics (or let's be honest, realistic physics[0,1]). Getting 50% of the way there in simulation really does cut down the costs of development, even if we recognize that cost steepens as we approach "there". I really wish they didn't call them "world models" or more specifically didn't shove the word "physics" in there, but hey, is it really marketing if they don't claim a golden goose can not only lay actual gold eggs but also diamonds and that its honks cure cancer?
[0] Looking right does not mean it is right. Maybe it'll match your intuition or undergrad general physics classes with calculus but talk to a real physicist if you doubt me here. Even one with just an undergrad will tell you this physics is unrealistic and any one worth their salt will tell you how unintuitive physics ends up being as you get realistic, even well before approaching quantum. Go talk to the HPC folks and ask them why they need superocmputers... Sorry, physics can't be done from observation alone.
[1] Seriously, I mean look at their demo page. It really is impressive, don't get me wrong, but I can't find a single video that doesn't have major physics problems. That "A high-altitude open world featuring deformable snow terrain." looks like it is simulating Legolas[2], not a real person. The work is impressive, but it isn't anywhere near realistic https://deepmind.google/models/genie/
Re: Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds
#75Everyone 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.
That’s part of it but if you could actually pull out 3D models from these worlds, it would massively speed up game development.
Re: Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds
#76Everyone 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.
Soft disagree; if you wanted imagination you don't need to make a video model. You probably don't need to decode the latents at all. That seems pretty far from information-theoretic optimality, the kind that you want in a good+fast AI model making decisions. The whole reason for LLMs inferencing human-processable text, and "world models" inferencing human-interactive video, is precisely so that humans can connect in…
Didn’t the original world models paper do some training in latent space? (Edit: yes[1])
I think robots imagining the next step (in latent space) will be useful. It’s useful for people. A great way to validate that a robot is properly imagining the future is to make that latent space renderable in pixels.
[1] “By using features extracted from the world model as inputs to an agent, we can train a very compact and simple policy that can solve the required task. We can even train our agent entirely inside of its own hallucinated dream generated by its world model, and transfer this policy back into the actual environment.”
Re: Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds
#77I 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…
Why is it a dead end, you don’t meaningfully explain that. These models look like you can interact with them and they seem to replicate physics models.
Re: Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds
#78If creating an infinite world is so trivially easy (relatively speaking) then occam suggests that this world is generated.
Re: Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds
#79Everyone 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.
That’s part of it but if you could actually pull out 3D models from these worlds, it would massively speed up game development.
You already can, check out Marble/World Labs, Meshy, and others.
It's not really as much of a boon as you'd think though, since throwing together a 3D model is not the bottleneck to making a sellable video game. You've had model marketplaces for a long time now.
Re: Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds
#80Everyone 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.
Soft disagree; if you wanted imagination you don't need to make a video model. You probably don't need to decode the latents at all. That seems pretty far from information-theoretic optimality, the kind that you want in a good+fast AI model making decisions. The whole reason for LLMs inferencing human-processable text, and "world models" inferencing human-interactive video, is precisely so that humans can connect in…
> I think the purpose of Genie is to be a video game, but it's a video game for AI researchers developing AIs.
Yeah, I think this is what the person above was saying as well. This is what people at google have said already (a few podcasts on gdm's channel, hosted by Hannah Fry). They have their "agents" play in genie-powered environments. So one system "creates" the environment for the task. Say "place the ball in the basket". Genie creates an env with a ball and a basket, and the other agent learns to wasd its way around, pick up the ball and wasd to the basket, and so on. Pretty powerful combo if you have enough compute to throw at it.