And no, this didn't: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2K_OLiZ_RM
> Prompt asks for saxophone
Looks inside:
> Sound of a clarinet
Maybe Genie 5 will get it.
> movies are going to become video games and video games are going to become something unimaginably better
Sometimes I really wanna skip 10 years into the future and see where all this eventually leads.
God what an annoying thing to say. Suggesting that movies will essentially become games, or that future video games will be unimaginably better (presumably because they are driven by generative world models) betrays such a surface level appreciation for what makes art and culture and all this humanity so beautiful as it is.
I agree that this technology is absolutely world changing, and am cautiously eager to see what comes of it, but it just bums me out, perhaps needlessly, that the people at the helm can be so artless, unreflective. Whatever.
Sounds glib, but honestly ... more Ads :/
> ... more Ads
It will be a nightmare! haha
That will soon likely no longer be the case.
Perhaps only half of "ads" are actually marked as such
So, it won't change that much from today, the difference won't be as big as the difference between 2000s ads and today
Do you actually think this is going to happen *to you* or are you just speculating about all the idiot dupes out there?
Sounds wonderful. May as well skip this and just spend my life hooked up to an IV drip of drugs.
[1] reality is also somewhat in question in the films universe
At least that's my recollection. I've watched the matrix a few times :)
One individual human (Cypher) did choose to be plugged back in, though it didn't work out for him.
Reality is very much blurry
This is the kind of detached from reality, devoid of humanity statement only a tech bro could come up with.
So would I. But I don't not want to experience it as a movie. It'd be something separate. Not an upgrade.
Which makes Sam's comment the inane blather of a pitchman. We don't need to bend over and try to steelman marketing dross. He doesn't care if that statement means nothing, why should we?
Llms wont be able to create good games. Consider for a sec that there's like 500 "Great" games ever made, maybe more but not much, in some genres that number is less than 10. There is no training data, and its largely a matter of taste and culture that cant be represented/distilled into vector embeddings.
Even if you have a great game idea, it takes a ton of time and money to even get it off the ground, let alone get it coded correctly and maybe get the reach you want. A LOT of flash in the pan ideas probably fizzled out faster than they needed (most recently Among Us and Fall Guys come to mind) because they were built to ship, not to easily modify.
Tech like this could lower the barrier to smaller and more creative teams or even individuals and get some better competition in the area. Fighting games KNEW that rollback was the way looooooong before AAA bit the bullet and started making it standard, and they still fuck it up (and it probably would've taken longer if COVID didn't force the issue and punish those lagging).
That said 2 of the largest hurdles i've seen in everyone's "magically ideal" game are enemy AI and Plot.
Interesting and well designed enemy AI is still hard, and even games that did it well built the whole game around it (FEAR) and the system is vastly less impressive without that focus (Just Cause). I don't think we're anywhere near modern AI solving the issue of making a good AI system for a game due to design space problems, but it might.
Plot though...that's tricky. Everyone always says how cool it would be for everything to be like Mass Effect or more, with all choices mattering and everything interacting, but someone has to write that. AI is not turning out well though out plot points that don't feel like the equivalent of Bethesda mission creep.
Point of this whole ramble being that in arcadey/simple stuff I think we'll see a lot more great games (and would argue we already were with the growth of the indie scene over the last 15 years thanks to steam and other tools), but there's still going to be entire genres that are just miserable to develop.
Instead of better it's become unimaginably worse since games can no longer serve as a means of self expression because the second you express anything worthwhile 100 people copy it immediately ... without you. It's like Disney (whose whole business model is copying public domain stories and music and ... but taking out the source and everyone who ever had anything to do with it). Except there's no longer one highly selective company destroying the world's culture one piece at a time, but 10000000 idiots looking to make a quick buck, destroying culture and self-expression like a fire raging in the rainforest.
There will be no more "celeste" games where you join for the platforming but stay for the (politically offensive to all sides) story, because AIs won't discuss the story as it's politically incorrect. Celeste is fundamentally about depression and anxiety, due to being transgender, and is about offending both sides of the argument. First, the main character is transgender, with zero explanation or need for explanation how far that goes, which of course offends conservatives. Second the goal of the main character is to run away from any provided help and professionals (which the director did too) and even under the most extreme of circumstances only reluctantly accept help from a family member that then promptly dies making things "worse".
The Qwen and other Chinese models (and ...) will refuse to discuss being transgender at all, and any western models will shut down any discussion of running away from help hard (because otherwise they get held responsible for the consequences, as has already happened)
(oh and that running away from professional help in psychological issue is actually observed to be a positive thing in almost all cases, in studies. The main way to make psychological problems worse is to let them fester and running away from help is time and time again observed to be far more productive than going to professionals and expecting them to fix things. Because that's an extreme human bias: it can never be (allowed to be) the right reaction to NOT do something about a problem, especially when countless people are paid to "solve" the problem. In other words: if you take people who expressed intent to commit suicide and compare the groups who "get help" and the group that successfully shut down help, less people actually go through with it in the second group, and worse than that, the more intense the help, the better the odds the patient ends up killing themselves. Right to the point that doctors sometimes assist such patients because after 2 years of attempts people live in constant misery and have caused enough medical damage that they will have constant pain or worse the rest of their life. And yet people keep forcing help on patients. Usually in response to an actual suicide where no help was provided. Then more help gets built, and 5 years later we yet again observe ... more suicides. But tell someone with an actual problem to avoid help and you'll be skinned alive for that)
So AI could never make a game like that. Not because it actually can't, or isn't capable, but because there already is a strong political bias, in every model you might use to make it and neither side is going to back down on their policies. The Chinese Communist Party is not suddenly going to change it's mind about transgenderism. And the western models are not suddenly going to openly discuss running away from psychological help, not even as part of a story.
So really, we've just lost these games.
Needle in a Haystack Simulator is the new Threes! https://www.theverge.com/22914955/threes-2048-ketchapp-copyc... A very simple game to clone that gets 10,000 headlines because creators have always been anxious about cheap clones. And, anxiety drives the clicks that pay the bills.
Meanwhile, local models are already extremely capable and slowly shrinking their gap vs. frontier models over time. And, it has been long established that the censorship trained into those models can be disabled easily with open-source tools. De-censored models will happily dig into topics that push beyond the limits of sanity, let alone political pearl-clutching.
Besides that. If you want to write about some topic and AI doesn't want to help you, you still have your fingers. Type like a human and you haven't lost anything compared to when Celeste was made.
Needle in a haystack isn't a game. It's a way to stimulate your brain for 30 seconds at best. It's not a game.
A proprietary version of this technology is already training Waymo's robot cars. Waymo blogged about their DeepMind-provided world model a year ago.
> It’s so obviously not representative of the real world.
That entirely depends on the use-case and level of granularity needed, doesn't it?
This blog is suggesting that we could train robots using only a world model.
> Do you have a basis for this idea, or it's a gut-feel?
My basis is that I’m a real human and these videos look far more like bad video games than the real life I’ve experienced.
I've seen weird stuff in images that OpenAI sends me in it's promotional emails too. I would think that if you were trying to show off you'd make sure there's none of these obvious AI issues in what you choose to show off with. Maybe they don't really care? "Gemini choose 10 scenes that would be impressive for our announcement and add them to the post."
Definitely wouldn't have been one of my picks to show off my fancy new model.
A visual makeover is great but what happens when millions of people fall in love with virtual characters who seem to deserve that love?
What on Earth is audio-like music? Do they mean music-like audio?
It seems like a good descriptor to me! ;)
Some sort of simple primal generative AI construct that just feeds a conscious experience for one. You. Nothing else is real. No one else is real.
Something like that would be an infinitely simpler, than running the physics and conscious experiences of this unimaginably large universe we think we're in.
It’s where I get the most value, and my expectations are very low, no attachment if it goes away
Of course they are mining me for data anyway, but they were doing that before already (and I do have a Gmail account, although I’ve almost completely stopped using Chrome - btw, it’s crazy that you can’t add plugins/extensions to Chrome on Guest mode)
sure, it's still a cool accomplishment but i can understand being a little bit frustrated / not as excited for such an announcement.
Whining that I, a random Internet user with limited budget, usecases that the researchers don't care about, and no connection to the researchers, don't get technical details (??) or access (??) on day one is just profoundly goofy shit.
Obviously being able to use these things right away would be more exciting. But to be unable to get excited by advancements we can't immediately use is... quite entitled.
> erhmygord I can't even buy this car right this second for nearly nothing and use it to drive a thousand miles per hour through a kindergarten parking lot?!?!
And I wish I had thought to grab that nick years ago…
When tweetles battle beetles… AND…
Well, I didn't go knocking on Google's door asking them to give me access to their fancy models. It's them who came up to us saying "hey, look at the amazing model we have here; too bad we won't tell you anything about how it works nor even let you access it". Entitled you say? Then maybe don't dangle a carrot right before my face, and then complain that I would like to eat it?
"Don't talk publicly about things I personally cannot use right now" is peak entitlement, yes.
I never said anything like this? My point wasn't that "I can't use it, therefore it's bad"; my point was that as-is there's pretty much nothing exciting about this. Just because this exists inside Google doesn't really mean or do anything; it doesn't meaningfully advance the state-of-art precisely because nothing about this is public.
Do you remember Sora[1]? Announced in pretty much exactly the same way -- grandiose webpage with fancy demos, zero technical details, limited availability and then... remind me what happened? Oh, right, they completely shut it down, and in the end it didn't "advance" squat. Might as well just never existed. So remind me why exactly I should be excited about this one here...?
Why not expect it? It's what most model releases do.
It's just a lame gimmick, this is not 2024 anymore, people have started to get sick of this AI thingie, especially when it comes to video/image generation. That Simon guy with his pelican is the exception that can only be seen on tech forums like this one.
As to why US (and probably also some Chinese) companies have started pouring hundreds of billions into AI-image generation is beyond my comprehension, but on the other hand I'm no economic genius.
If this is the best “frontier” they can achieve, then it’s no wonder they haven’t done anything groundbreaking in the space yet that produces practical results.
Only open weights matter.
We should distill everything else we can into open weights.
These are exciting for robotics and industrial perhaps, but they have no consumer use case until the lid is blown off and consumers can do whatever they want with them.
So much societal progress is behind held up because the leading labs want to keep a stranglehold on the tech. Imagine if every PhD or hacker had access to the raw weights.
Which stems from the fact that most people have never created or contributed anything meaningful.
It used to be a lot different.
Look at companies trying to build more things that pull value into their private cloud offerings.
I feel refusal'd just *looking* at this page.
Gah. Go iterate. Listen to customers, adapt, iterate some more etc etc. That's how products are made.
(Maybe I should reallocate some of my GOOG stock into ANT after all.)
I feeling I get from this is that this could be the mental model for a robot in the real world, continuously corrected by actual events.
We all have a world model in our heads of what we think is going to happen, we adjust quickly (or not) based on what does. This is pretty incredible stuff.
They wouldn't be called "Laws of Physics" if obeying them was optional. If your center of gravity is outside your base, you _will_ topple over. That's just how gravity works.
As an aside, why fall into the role of being an apologist for google-hype and Big Tech?
And why not? Because the first model that can actually learn to handle the simulation not only can do the simulation internally too, but it can do it better than out simulation.
It's where (ex-)"AI luminaries" go to die. It's a way to make glacial, slow progress in the correct direction while never actually getting anywhere.
So we get to a point and people keep making complicated simulations of one kind or another ... and then someone (some model) who's never used the simulation, and doesn't need it for model training gets by far the highest score on every benchmark and everyone agrees the simulation was kind of beside the point.
If it's the latter, I don't see a 'hole'.
This has already happened to other ML fields. For example, there's not much point anymore to ASR models (just feed audio into LLMs) and the space that TTS models occupy is fast disappearing. Oh and it's not just that Qwen 3.6 is a good ASR in addition to being good at coding mario. Doing things this way, not using an ASR model is fundamentally more expressive. A whole bunch of companies started up on ASR + TTS "towers" (lots of models, Pipecat style) as they're called, and they're dead companies walking. Their tech has been surpassed by just bog-standard generic LLMs in a way that they will never get the upper hand again.
A chain of models approach, a separate ASR, will never do this: "you said you agree but I can hear you're sarcastic, so I'll explain again". Also getting a conversational tower to switch languages when the user does that (or when it makes sense in a language course) is not quite impossible but very, very hard. And yet feeding audio directly into Qwen will almost magically solve these problems better than I will ever do it (lightly finetuned). It's fundamentally better in every way (except perhaps speed, of course. Although arguably such a tower needs an LLM too, it'll just have way less tokens)
This point has long been passed for image recognition. Feeding a photo or screenshot into a full LLM along with a request on what to do beats the crap out of any OCR, image recognition, ... model every time these days.
And now there's also hints of world models just being bypassed. Just giving a finetuned model the last 50 video frames (surprisingly, that fits in context, especially at reduced resolution), movement statistics, motor power, status, ... of a robot and asking what to do actually works (with heavy finetuning, but I think it'll start working without). Well ... AND then distilling that knowledge into a much smaller model because B200 racks are more than a bit to heavy for a logistics robot to carry around. But we'll get over that.
I know I could run the content through a fingerprint detector. However, I'm a professional software engineer...not a normal user.
What's the ethical impact of this technology??
It's easy for them to show demos of abstract things because they don't necessarily have to follow real-world rules, but anything modeled after real world falls short of expectations.
I am more interested in how to make consistent "participants" and "environment" with multiple clips so they look like one longer clip.
Will that require same dev/coding harness and spec-kit-like engineering flow?
Like create a spec on how a movie will look like, feed contexts, create tasks so that multiple clips look congruent?
[1]: https://www.minid.net/2026/8/2/the-actor-was-the-expensive-p...
The original Genie was a great piece of work with a real sense of purpose - to enable agents to learn about the real world in the way Dreamer or Schmidhuber's paper sketched. But now most of the people that drove that mission have left Deepmind (Jack Parker-Holder, Tim Rocktaschel, Demis) and it's become this instead.
One possible use for these is to facilitate lab -> this -> real world for robot models. Basically better than lab / algorithmically designed environments and cheaper / easier to train on than real life. Something that "looks" like real life and can scale, to apply RL for robotics to.
Anyway, let's take your theory to its logical conclusion: the product development between real and simulated soft tissue behavior is much bigger than Exponential Time being a hypothesis and being proven. There isn't some effective acceleraltruist path here. Dario Amodei was a biotech dropout. The thing you are betting on which Google is not doing anyway, maybe they will destroy the descriptive single cell sequencing paper mill, but they're not going to be able to simulate the fat inside a BMI 30 abuela undergoing a gallbladder removal.
It's a dystopian business use case that I hope will get obliterated in the near future as the generations that believe in this stuff and are fascinated by it age out of the population.
for all the a.i misery with hardware prices i.e ram.
such a wonderful world we live in now.
The only place I see this applicable is for visual artists prototyping
So yea that one expensive ad would probably have a positive impact compared to a tidal wave of slop. Quality > Quantity after all.
Video games are interesting because of very specific constraints the developers impose on the player.
Show them or I'll assume this is pure marketing.
> audio-like music
That's a hyphen. What's "audio-like music" -- music that is almost sound but not quite? Music made from raw audio? :-)
audio, e.g. music
audio — like music
Hyphens should be used to link compound/suffix words, not em dashes.
Yes, "-like" is commonly used as a suffix, in which case a hyphen is correct. But describing music as "audio-like" is clearly nonsense (music isn't "like" audio, it is audio), so that's not the sense in which it's being used here.
For clarity, the full sentence is:
> Genie 4 is natively multimodal, enabling audio-like music, ambient noises, and interactive dialogue to be simultaneously generated with the world.
Looks like a hiccup, which created an odd and ambiguous sentence.
Question I have is when will they be able to render something more then 30 seconds.
And how much will it cost? There has to be a HUGE amount of computing power behind this. As a video game developer I live in fear and anticipation.
Would be fun to muck around with world models. Are there any that I can try for under £200 p/m without being part of a special project?
Every time I'm about to be excited about AI the cynic in me slaps me back to reality. I imagine the endless possibilities of AI for disabled people, then realize that it's going to leave millions of people disabled instead.
The painting->interactive scene looks astonishing though
An LLM generates four alternative prompts for what could happen next and there's a real time vote running for each option. It's trippy, like watching someone's dream.
Real nice prompting there, Google. It also still looks like a video game rendering.
It doesn’t matter how impressive your demo is if it takes a literal data center to run.
Actual innovation can’t be seen at the let’s just throw money at it level. But, it can be seen at the that’s cool. I can run it on my laptop level.
In the same way, seeing that something is possible gives hope to the people who are making those open models that you want.
Until you've spend $100-150 on their platform. Then you get 250 per day until you spend $2000 and it becomes properly unlimited.
It is really annoying. I'm literally trying to pay you for a service and you won't let me.
... I'm suddenly reminded of Iain M Banks' "Surface Detail".
If these are the cause of why I have to pay 2-4x I used to for a computer, then Google should go fuck themselves.
> Genie form [sic] can simulate scenarios
It's kind of amazing: the juxtaposition of such advanced generative AI and such terrible speech-to-text coming from the same parent company.
It's why if you search a practical task you will often see results link to specific parts of a video.
> Genie 4 is natively multimodal, enabling audio-like music, ambient noises, and interactive dialogue to be simultaneously generated with the world.
(Emphasis mine). Like, yeah, I'd sure hope the music is similar to audio.
I wonder if this was a de-LLMese pass gone wrong, and the original was "enabling audio -- like music, ambient noises, and interactive dialogue -- to be simultaneously generated with the world.
So, Stadia + World Models = New generation of DRM for games.
October? Yeah, just release the "Spiderman saves Halloween" prompt.
This is a wet dream for big studios.
We'll be riding the huge wave of indie titles that are incoming.
The problem will be separating the wheat (people with good stories and concepts enabled by Ai) from the chaff (people with no taste slopping out trash with Ai)
I also love thrifting and artifact hunting.
I mean - reviewers!
been checking out the archives lately, nothing recent excites me
Do you have even the slightest idea of the level of expectation that even the most casual gamer has?
This isn’t achieving much beyond prototyping. They’re burning so much money for no reason.
There are so many options for games now that just sticking with the biggest AAA companies seems like a waste.
Ai generated games suck even more, no skill; no taste, there is no TLC put into them
Then there is the economics of it, cost prohibitive to (re)generate a scene and ship that over internet pipes
The latency was no good even on fast internet for even slow games. It is and was pointless.
That made no sense and wasn't a viable business model.
https://www.denofgeek.com/games/why-google-stadia-failed-shu...
> beforehand...
is about the craze, the ChatGPT moment and beyond, when GPUs demand went exponential, not when various types of Ai algorithms were available
... history is helpful ... google didn't - and still doesn't - understand gamers, same for all the other Ai hucksters, gamers are among the most anti-Ai
Also, lmao, they're already trying to nickel and dime you and sell you microtransactions that took 5 minutes to make for 10 bucks. If you think they're going to pay the costs for running a world model for every single person, lol.
Is it feasible? What Dyson sphere level of power would be needed to maintain such a simulation? Is that level of energy available to whomever is running the simulation?
Is there a positive ROI? What does this advanced civilization get out of running such an expensive simulation?
Is it moral? The simulation involves sentient creatures who are capable of deeply contemplating their own existence, capable of feeling rapturous pleasure and indescribable pain and loss, and ostensibly capable of making moral choices that range from heroic to depraved. Doesn't there come a point where the beings in a simulation are so close to the beings in "base reality" that the same moral principles apply? If you press a button that kicks off a simulation where humans can torture and murder each other, behaving essentially identically to humans in "base reality," aren't you in some sense facilitating those deaths?
Why would you assume energy is relevant to whoever turned on our simulation? If I created a simulation where the only source of energy was cotton candy, my creations might ask "but where would our creator even get enough cotton candy to run a simulation like this", not realize that it's absurd to think that the creator of a simulation has any of the same constraints that exist inside the simulation.
Reductionist but I feel like that’s how it would go.