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.
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.
Astonishing to me that a company like Google would be willing to publish such a terrible looking product demo. Interactive, but with completely made-up inputs that are ignored?
I think you're exactly right. This was already a problem with Genie 3, but they've appear to have gone all in on video generation over controllability.
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.
I wonder if that's because the target audience is people directing/producing (commercial) videos, rather than games.
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.
> 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.
The more parsimonious explanation is that 100 PMs are even less qualified to make surgical robots, but at least they can download a video game and play it for 5 minutes. There's a great scene in You Can See Everything where Billy Evans is watching bio presentations on 1.5x speed, which obviously, makes him look like a huge moron - "knowing enough" bio is very bearish.
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.
Sorry, I thought you were asking about the tech applications. I have no idea about the other stuff, can't comment.
Just as JPod by Douglas Coupland predicted.
When Google's epitaph is eventually written, PMs will figure prominently as the catalyst for the rapidly accelerating decline.
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.
The point is simulation for autonomous vehicles and robots.