Genie 3: The World Becomes Playable (DeepMind)

In the week that we are set to get GPT5, it might be easy to miss this announcement of Google Deep Minds Genie 3. To cut a long story short, it makes the world playable. Start with an image, which could be one of your photos, and then enter that world and modify it with prompts. By entering, I mean you can move around, take actions that last and stay in that world, and basically go wild.

I was given early access to the presentation of Genie3 and got to ask the makers a question, but I'm going to be honest. Genie 3 is designed and marketed to allow AI agents to act out scenarios and self-improve at taking actions. That's the theory for me. And let me know if you agree.

It will be used much more for gamifying all of reality and your imagination. If you have been following the channel for just a little bit, you know that I interviewed a senior researcher on Genie 2, Tim Rockshaw here and on my Patreon. And at the time, we learned that Genie 2 would quote scale gracefully with more compute. Well, it did.

And now we get real-time interaction in 720p 24 frames pers. If that's jargon to you, it means you can click some buttons and things happen at the exact same time on screen at fairly high resolution. Now, in a couple of minutes, I'm going to show you the full intro, which is about 130 seconds, I think, which is unusual for this channel. I don't normally show clips that long, but it does showcase Genie 3 really quite well.

First though, just a few thoughts from me. Jack Parker Holder, the lead author of Genie3, told me and a bunch of journalists, that the goal behind it was to have a move 37 moment for embodied AI, as in for robots, not just for computers that play games. A move 37 moment is a high bar, as any of you who have watched the Alph Go documentary know, but think of it as a novel breakthrough that goes beyond the human data. In other words, we just don't have enough data to train robots reliably given the innumerable scenarios in which they'll be placed.

If we can simulate all worlds, then we might get novel breakthroughs for those robots. Get them to do things ...