Genie 4

174 points | by acossta an hour ago

78 comments

  • kouteiheika 18 minutes ago

    Looks cool, but it's very hard to get me excited about yet another proprietary model for which absolutely zero technical details are released (not even the number of parameters), which is safetymaxxed to the limit, and whose usage quota will (most likely) be so limited that it'll be effectively useless for anyone who doesn't work at Google or doesn't have infinite money.

      estearum a minute ago

      What an insane set of requirements for a frontier technology and your excitement by it.

  • daniel31x13 3 minutes ago

    Reminds me of a post[1] by Sam Altman in 2024:

    > 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.

    [1]: https://x.com/sama/status/1776083954786836979

  • mlmonkey 33 minutes ago

    In the clip with a marble bust dropped on a watermelon, at this point https://imgur.com/a/IHLnkUs the bust should've toppled over, if the physics were properly modeled.

  • germanjoey 6 minutes ago

    In the man walking through the dressing room scene, the camera starts behind the man. And you can see that the left half of his body is wearing a grey suit... but the right half is wearing a grey dress. :O

  • alphabetting 4 minutes ago

    The playable element is cool PR but the news is that endless synthetic training data for embodied AI models is basically here or close.

  • ddtaylor 4 minutes ago

    Is anyone actually making any games with these tools? Like, can I play one on Steam or something?

  • TGower 39 minutes ago

    That stained glass landscape video is pretty cool. I wonder if it would be possible to implement that effect in a real-time game engine.

  • WarmWash 6 minutes ago

    I highly suspect that Genie is being made primarily for internal use, and access is more to gather feedback/training data and a bit of PR.

  • gradascent 7 minutes ago

    > Genie 4 is natively multimodal, enabling audio-like music, ambient noises, and interactive dialogue

    What on Earth is audio-like music? Do they mean music-like audio?

      LoganDark 3 minutes ago

      That was probably meant to be an em-dash, or have spaces around the hyphen.

      thenthenthen 5 minutes ago

      Audio like: music, ambient-noises etc

      vitorfblima 5 minutes ago

      As opposed to video-like music...

      mailarchis 6 minutes ago

      probably meant "audio like music, ambient noises, and interactive dialogue."

  • TZubiri 2 minutes ago

    Who'd be down to write a science fiction novel where creating fake images is a crime and not a product?

  • runtime_terror 20 minutes ago

    Gotta love the kraken destroying the city in the background of the Hong Kong lovers motorcycle scene despite nothing in the prompt about monsters. Filmmakers are still safe.

      speerer 12 minutes ago

      It prompts "gigantic alien tentacles that destroy the world."

      I suspect you're reading the base prompt, but the video also demonstrates adding further prompts to change what is happening as the scene progresses.

  • delichon 13 minutes ago

    Every increment of advance in this field is an increment of evidence that we are simulations.

      dsizzle 3 minutes ago

      Not sure if you're joking, but the only such evidence I could think of would be something like finding some way to influence the hardware of our simulation and seeing a glitch in our world

  • prymitive 5 minutes ago

    The third video is proof that v4 can, ekhm, walk slower?

  • oldfuture 6 minutes ago

    guys they are building digital cages so they can rob you blind while you are in your nice digital world, sorry we will ignore this stuff into oblivion

  • vatsachak 14 minutes ago

    What is the point of this vs cheap robotic arm simulations?

    The only place I see this applicable is for visual artists prototyping

      ajs1998 9 minutes ago

      You could produce a thousand cheap ads for your product or one expensive real ad.

      throw310822 7 minutes ago

      You could produce immersive VR content specified only by prompts and in which any action is possible.

  • smusamashah 21 minutes ago

    A big chunk of the right side of castle disappeared, including catapult, when camera turned back while flying on dragon. See 1:25 to 1:29. I was not expecting this to happen in a "world model".

      ksec 6 minutes ago

      I was under the impression he has already fly past the catapult.

  • BatFastard 23 minutes ago

    Amazing!

    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.

  • mike_hearn 15 minutes ago

    Google aren't the only ones with this tech. You can try out a 24/7 rolling set of video feeds for yourself at https://fal.live

    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.

  • Sol- 24 minutes ago

    Neuralink integration and I'm out of here.

  • jackb4040 19 minutes ago

    It's hard for me to understand Google's redefinition of "world models" (basically: a txt2videogame modality for LLMs) as anything other than an attempt to bury Yann Lecun's definition of "world models", which includes an implicit bear case against LLMs and thus Google's stock price.

  • ytxm 33 minutes ago

    Surprised that "do you really think we're going to make it?" scene made the cut of the first video, her expression and tone is totally out of sync with the scene and demonstrates the problem with almost every AI gen video I've come across when it comes to capturing humanity.

    The painting->interactive scene looks astonishing though

  • HughParry 20 minutes ago

    >coming soon to Google AI Ultra subscribers in Project Genie

    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?

  • reverseblade2 18 minutes ago

    Infinite Tsukuyomi is coming soon…

  • sodacanner 44 minutes ago

    I don't know if I'm missing the point, but Genie 4 almost looks worse than Genie 3 in terms of player control? It doesn't even seem to respond to inputs, it just looks like they took some AI generated videos and put the key widgets on top.

      maybeOneDay 22 minutes ago

      I wonder if that's because the target audience is people directing/producing (commercial) videos, rather than games.

      doctorpangloss 39 minutes ago

      another POV is, what even are these experiences? whom are they for? it would take Google 10 minutes to hire all the best game developers for Android, and cost them like $2m, which is peanuts, and give them fancy Google Research titles. but instead, they're trying to get 100 google PMs, who don't give their kids screentime and who don't play any games the objective of making a product for Bart Simpsons. like these people don't realize that being good parents disqualifies them from making immersive first person shooter, "narrative" experiences.

        NitpickLawyer 31 minutes ago

        > what even are these experiences? whom are they for?

        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.

        mlmonkey 31 minutes ago

        When Google's epitaph is eventually written, PMs will figure prominently as the catalyst for the rapidly accelerating decline.

        paimapi 18 minutes ago

        Why hire crew or actors when you could have them be fully AI? Why film a commercial with fluffed, oil dusted, well-lit hamburgers when you could fully render something? Why actually have a vehicle capable of off-roading when you could just AI-render what it looks like off-roading (or vertically taking off, for eg)?

        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.

        post-it 24 minutes ago

        Just as JPod by Douglas Coupland predicted.

        empath75 28 minutes ago

        The point is simulation for autonomous vehicles and robots.

  • wolttam 38 minutes ago

    > "A REAL, ultra-photorealistic, high-end 35mm cinematic first-person perspective..."

    Real nice prompting there, Google. It also still looks like a video game rendering.

      slashtrends 34 minutes ago

      ironically, the word "realistic" appears next to game footage, not next to real one.

        taneq 26 minutes ago

        Not ironic at all. You describe a rendered image as photorealistic, you just call a photo a photo.

  • zardo 28 minutes ago

    Showing off an anglo-bias with the Japanese train station in the 1980s, with a man speaking english.

  • viccis 17 minutes ago

    Hmm, wonder if Databricks trademarked their Genie AI product.

  • inshard 33 minutes ago

    So world models capture inherent complexity of physical reality to help teach AI about hidden laws which probably helps train both LLMs and multimodal models used for autonomous vehicles and robots? And AMD acquiring World Labs is a move to outdo Nvidia’s work in this space. And Google probably sees this as a gateway to a new platform of autonomous vehicles and humanoids that they could rent out as a CSP? Competing with Nvidia, Tesla and complementing Waymo. Am I getting that right?

  • pdntspa 36 minutes ago

    So does this export 3d assets or an Unreal/godot/unity project so it can be turne dinto a game or is it limited to their runtime?

  • pacman1337 21 minutes ago

    this is the gta6 I am was hoping for

  • varispeed 17 minutes ago

    What is this for? I cannot understand these models. They are very much polluting the internet with nonsense and use capacity that people and businesses need for actual work.

    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.

  • Zambyte 43 minutes ago

    From the auto-generated captions on the YouTube video on this page.

    > 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.

      phoghed 36 minutes ago

      The volume of content on YouTube is enormous, I’m kind of surprised they offer auto captions at all given that they have little to no competition in the space.

        rustyhancock 33 minutes ago

        Is it surprising? Indexing for search is the backbone of Google's business model.

        It's why if you search a practical task you will often see results link to specific parts of a video.

      fwip 39 minutes ago

      They're not proof-reading the blog posts either. The second sentence:

      > 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.

        kridsdale1 22 minutes ago

        These days, unproofread text adds authenticity.

  • rvz an hour ago

    As I said before, World models will become simulation engines of AAA games where there is no need to release the actual game artifact and even if the game exists as a binary artifact, it will never be released and will be available on their hosted cloud back-end, then simulated and streamed back to you.

    So, Stadia + World Models = New generation of DRM for games.

      MattDaEskimo an hour ago

      Why? Why would a non-deterministic engine be better for a game when it can be instead structured and made deterministic and then more effectively distributed to consumer hardware?

        SomeonesAccount 41 minutes ago

        It wouldn't be better for players. It would be better for companies because the user no longer owns the computer that runs the game.

          phyzix5761 31 minutes ago

          You can still stream a deterministic world to the player.

          moralestapia 36 minutes ago

          And a month or so of development time. Pure IP re-selling.

          October? Yeah, just release the "Spiderman saves Halloween" prompt.

          This is a wet dream for big studios.

        verdverm 33 minutes ago

        it's not, it just sounds cooler to say prophetic things like this these days

      causal an hour ago

      Game industry is still struggling to find a way to incorporate regular LLMs without suffering catastrophic edge cases. A long way to go before these can do more than fancy tech demo, I think.

      paxy 38 minutes ago

      Because it wasn’t bad enough to need a $5000 5090 to play a game, now you’re going to need a full rack of them!

      qup 43 minutes ago

      They can try, my household won't be purchasing those.

      We'll be riding the huge wave of indie titles that are incoming.

        verdverm 30 minutes ago

        > 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)

          BatFastard 3 minutes ago

          Isn't that what streamers are for?

          I mean - reviewers!

      ActionHank 38 minutes ago

      Because stadia was a real banger right?

      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.

      pixl97 an hour ago

      And? Just spin up some open world model and pay for the compute and play your own games?

      There are so many options for games now that just sticking with the biggest AAA companies seems like a waste.

      verdverm an hour ago

      Stadia is dead, the reason is playing games over the internet sucks, input lag and serious graphics degradation - this is why I cancelled

      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

        ZiiS 39 minutes ago

        Stadia is dead because if you have a data-center of GPUs you are using them for AI. It has nothing to do with input lag and graphics degradation.

          ActionHank 35 minutes ago

          Oh no my guy, you are misremembering, stadia died a quiet death long before AI.

          The latency was no good even on fast internet for even slow games. It is and was pointless.

            Matl 4 minutes ago

            Stadia was pretty good, be it OnLive was similar quality in like 2010. It even had the best version of Cyberpunk 2077 when that launched. But the model was free version of the service for a limited resolution AND you have to buy games there OR a subscription based option and you still have to buy games there.

            That made no sense and wasn't a viable business model.

          verdverm 37 minutes ago

          stadia died way beforehand, history is useful

          https://www.denofgeek.com/games/why-google-stadia-failed-shu...

            ZiiS 30 minutes ago

            I am sure the are other typical Google fumbles that would have meant they were not the victor; but I am sure an equivalent service would be mainstream today if AI had not dramatically changed the economics. [also Google bought DeepMind in 2014; 'way beforehand' is and odd way to look at it]

              verdverm 26 minutes ago

              I disagree, dropping below 60 FPS will be noticed and turn players away, you are not getting that with good input handling even today, it has nothing to do with GPUs and everything to do with networking

              > beforehand...

              is about the craze, the ChatGPT moment and beyond, when GPUs demand went exponential, not when various types of Ai algorithms were available

      well_ackshually 43 minutes ago

      And nobody will play that trash, and the world won't change.

      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.

  • 233mhz 30 minutes ago

    Y tho?

  • ajs1998 12 minutes ago

    Who is asking for this? Do advertisers really want this? I feel dread about many of the AI products being sold. They're mostly tools to help funnel money from the users to the bosses.