Top
Best
New

Posted by acossta 16 hours ago

Genie 4(deepmind.google)
857 points | 502 commentspage 2
gradascent 15 hours 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?

thenthenthen 15 hours ago||
Audio like: music, ambient-noises etc
siva7 14 hours ago|||
I'm blessed to see that even google let their most important marketing prosa be generated by ai models without any proofreading from fleshy humans.
sbrother 14 hours ago|||
That isn't a mistake AI would make though -- it's something a human would accidentally do when replacing em dashes with hyphens
fwip 12 hours ago||
Which they would do if the text was LLM-generated and they wanted to disguise that fact. Or have a vibe-coded script to do the same.
chis 5 hours ago||
I'm sorry but this comment is idiotic on so many levels
strangegecko 13 hours ago||||
It could have been a human trying to justify their existence. "no no, I wrote this ad copy myself: look, no em-dashes!".
chis 5 hours ago|||
Quite the reverse honestly, I found it really funny that they didn't bother to have an AI proofread it before sending out
LoganDark 15 hours ago|||
That was probably meant to be an em-dash, or have spaces around the hyphen.
mailarchis 15 hours ago|||
probably meant "audio like music, ambient noises, and interactive dialogue."
moritzwarhier 15 hours ago||
or just "music-like audio"?
moritzwarhier 15 hours ago|||
Have you listened to "music" created by non-specialized models that use WebAudio to create?

It seems like a good descriptor to me! ;)

vitorfblima 15 hours ago||
As opposed to video-like music...
angusturner 5 hours ago||
I think its a useful exercise to try and name a cultural artifact (picture, video, game, music, book, etc) that was improved, or made substantially possible, by this technology. Ideally something that has moved you or provoked a lasting response.

Conversely, try to think of examples where Generative AI has betrayed a lack of creativity or care from the creator, and thus left a sour or ambivalent or impression.

I find the former impossibly hard, and the latter depressingly easy. Do others feel the same?

CosmicShadow 5 hours ago||
There are tons of cool, creative, funny and wow stuff being done with AI. A third of my Instagram feed is AI creators and some of the stuff they do is mind blowing, but even when it's not super impressive, some of it is just so creative and well done. Saiyenfeld is amazing (DBZ Seinfeld mashup by grickusai). It's taking a medium that is familiar, putting a spin on it and doing it well. You can do things that you couldn't do otherwise. People with interesting concepts can finally get them out of their head into something really interesting. People are so doomer and depressed, but they purposely don't see the stuff that is just fucking fun. I spend all day with a 5090 and courses and I still can't make stuff as good, creative, cool or funny as these people who actually have those talents and they are just fuddling through with token services.

If you want to get inspired go to civitai and look through the top stuff and be wowed. Maybe they didn't draw it, but they figured out how to make it happen and when you look at enough generated stuff you can tell the average from the holy shit. It's easy to get inspired by what people can come up with and want to do something yourself, which is a positive impact I'd say.

angusturner 4 hours ago||
I'm glad you feel this way.

I can't personally relate, and I think its kind of telling that I'm being down-voted for simply asking people to engage with this thought experiment.

rohin15 44 minutes ago|||
I agree, I don't understand why this technology has so much energy put into it. Just because we can doesn't mean we should?
Zambyte 5 hours ago|||
By Genie specifically? Or by generative AI in general?

If you mean world models like Genie,I don't know. If you mean the latter, I have definitely used software that I have enjoyed that I do not believe would have been possible without generative AI.

Fluxer is the first Discord competitor that when you show to someone they can't say "well Discord does X better", and it was largely made using AI.

Herdr is designed for AI usage, but I actually really like it even for just normal terminal multiplexing. It was surely made with a lot of AI.

I have seen people make incredible things at my work that have actually solved multi-year long pain points that we've never had the resources to address before.

I have used AI to patch and revive a bunch of small services like chat bots or web services and such that I had made and had decayed into failure over the years.

Sure, it's easy to point at people using AI as a megaphone for their lack of care. But I don't think it's impossibly hard to find people doing good things with it either.

angusturner 5 hours ago||
Software might be the exception, but I think some skepticism is still warranted.

When software is hard there's a kind of filter; a good piece of software means a human/team behind it with grit and care and user empathy. You can have some* confidence in the continued stability and maintenance of the software. (*relatively speaking, and with huge error bars).

Without knowing the details of Fluxer, if someone tells me about a vibecoded Discord clone, my immediate thoughts are like: - how much thought and care went into this? - how much work from Discord has been cannibalized? - will the authors be around next week to keep maintaining and making improvements and thinking deeply about their users?

I have also seen a lot of fantastic demos and stuff with AI coding. I use AI coding all day. I just think there's a weird gap still, where code and images and text are all "cheap", but none of this has translated into anything I personally use or care about.

chis 5 hours ago|||
They're not really promising to do that. It's not even clear this model will be meaningfully commercialized. The key line is "Understanding and simulating the world is a crucial aspect of building AGI". This model will be used for research and robotics, and maybe the training of further models.
angusturner 4 hours ago||
Without getting into a larger argument about whether this is the correct approach to building AGI, I think its reasonable to ask people to engage with how this technology gets used in practice, besides its nominal purpose of "building AGI".

The predominant way people engage with this technology right now is through slop content in their instagram feeds.

(Btw I say all this as someone that has worked on generative models for 10 years).

demibabs 5 hours ago|||
Unironically, Tung Tung Tung Sahur and some funny music video about p(doom). But yeah that’s basically it.
Andrex 5 hours ago||
Throw a gifted storyteller at any medium and they will produce something worth paying attention to. AI generated content has not had that moment yet. I'm not sure it will ever, but it's worth thinking about.

It took the medium of film ~50 years to find Hitchock and ~75 to find Spielberg.

angusturner 4 hours ago||
I have thought about it.

I'm encouraging others to do the same and be honest with themselves about the direction we're headed.

pandepratham 1 hour ago||
This is going to transform how we create games, movie content, and interact with virtual worlds, as well as those born from our imagination. You have control, like a simulator where you can close your eyes and immerse yourself in artificial worlds that feel incredibly real. It’s crazy how fast things are changing.
kouteiheika 15 hours 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.
peri-cl 15 hours ago||
> "which is safetymaxxed to the limit,"

I feel refusal'd just *looking* at this page.

estearum 15 hours ago|||
What an insane set of requirements for a frontier technology and your excitement by it.
dack 15 hours ago|||
i think he's bummed out that a cool thing has shipped but: 1. he doesn't get any information about how it works 2. he doesn't get to use it

sure, it's still a cool accomplishment but i can understand being a little bit frustrated / not as excited for such an announcement.

estearum 15 hours ago|||
Most cutting edge technologies through history have been 1) somewhat opaque and 2) narrow/exclusive in their deployment. Historically speaking, that's virtually synonymous with "cutting edge technology".

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.

dotancohen 15 hours ago|||
Most cutting edge technologies through history did not have near-peer widely-deployed open competitors. This technology does.
tweetle_beetle 14 hours ago||||
The sole purpose of a press release is to generate positive interest. It is not entitled for the reader to expect the time they have invested in reading it to be worthwhile.
estearum 14 hours ago|||
Press release announcing a new car:

> 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?!?!

aleqs 13 hours ago||
If you mean that this press release amounts to the AI equivalent of the latest Tesla Roadster 'release'... then I guess you're kinda right
travisgriggs 13 hours ago|||
This.

And I wish I had thought to grab that nick years ago…

When tweetles battle beetles… AND…

seanhunter 15 hours ago||||
It’s not an exciting advancement if it’s just the AI equivalent of google wave. It’s totally reasonable to be skeptical of marketing and want to try something for yourself.
adamrezich 14 hours ago|||
Absolutely no need to slander Google Wave like that.
taytus 13 hours ago||
Oh, but there is, good sir. There is.
jcelerier 10 hours ago||||
.. what was wrong with google wave? I kinda miss it
estearum 14 hours ago|||
Fake hacker thinking Google Wave wasn't released to the public lol
seanhunter 13 hours ago||
Google wave was eventually released to the public but initially it required an invitation. So if you had a friend at google you could get in but if not you were out of luck. This killed early momentum and when they eventually opened up the product was dead on arrival.
kouteiheika 14 hours ago||||
> But to be unable to get excited by advancements we can't immediately use is... quite entitled.

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?

estearum 13 hours ago||
Then don't click on the link homie

"Don't talk publicly about things I personally cannot use right now" is peak entitlement, yes.

kouteiheika 13 hours ago||
> "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...?

[1] -- https://openai.com/index/sora/

aleqs 13 hours ago||||
In order to claim there is any 'advancement' here requires a baseline of openness which is not met here.
visarga 15 hours ago|||
> is just profoundly goofy shit

Why not expect it? It's what most model releases do.

taytus 13 hours ago|||
Yeah, I read it as: " Cool! Who cares? " Maybe because that's how I felt
recursive 15 hours ago||||
You must have a very narrow conception of sanity.
I-M-S 15 hours ago||||
The future is coming by appointment only.
zhengyi13 14 hours ago||
I think this might be what Gibson meant by "... it's just not evenly distributed"
aleqs 13 hours ago||||
Not insane at all, completely sensical.
paganel 13 hours ago||||
> frontier technology

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.

Der_Einzige 15 hours ago||||
No it’s not insane.
tourmalinetaco 13 hours ago||||
If I can’t realistically use it then I don’t care, especially when there’s no independent proof yet it works this well, given a cursory glance. If it trickles down into future developments I can use then cool, but it likely won’t because they want a moat. You don’t have to shield the poor defenseless multi-billion dollar megacorp from the genuine apathy they inspire.

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.

echelon 15 hours ago||||
It's another closed world model.

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.

estearum 15 hours ago|||
The general history of new technologies is that they're available for a narrow set of circumstances and then they proliferate. Can't believe that needs to be said on "hackernews"
WarmWash 14 hours ago|||
Default internet culture is "I am entitled to everything digital, in full, for free".

Which stems from the fact that most people have never created or contributed anything meaningful.

echelon 14 hours ago||
The internet has become a privacy and rent seeking hell hole.

It used to be a lot different.

Look at companies trying to build more things that pull value into their private cloud offerings.

amlib 14 hours ago||||
Except that most technology was built in a way that didn't require all of the humanity knowledge and labor to be sequestered and then regurgitated back as slop that we need to pay as a subscription from what essentially is a rent seeking mafia.
aleqs 13 hours ago|||
The only one pretending this is something that needs to be said, for whatever reason, is you.
aleqs 13 hours ago|||
amen
alex_sf 15 hours ago|||
I mean this doesn't seem very insane? Basic info about the model, the ability to actually use it. Google in particular is awful about getting access to their models from the UX side: I don't even bother trying them out unless it's via openrouter.
lukan 15 hours ago||
Yeah, I want that too, including the weights and training material. But I am still exited by what one could potentially do with it, by looking at the prompts and generated videos, even if it is cherry picked.
nico 13 hours ago|||
I’ve decide that the best (and maybe only) way for me to interact with google AI models, is on the search results

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)

spiderice 15 hours ago|||
I don't get how Google is so horrible at product. Let me play with this. Otherwise it's DOA.
lysace 14 hours ago||
That touches on the core reason not to get excited about these Google releases: They release something cool and then don't iterate on it. Instead they go off building another cool demo instead.

Gah. Go iterate. Listen to customers, adapt, iterate some more etc etc. That's how products are made.

Spoom 14 hours ago||
Some companies are so default-alive due to essentially building a money printer that risk tolerance has been tuned down severely.
lysace 13 hours ago||
So Google is the new Microsoft but with better software engineering quality. And two decades younger. And they're still slowing down.

(Maybe I should reallocate some of my GOOG stock into ANT after all.)

butlike 12 hours ago|||
I'm not entirely convinced the new models aren't just a rollback to a clean training data state after the current model has been released for a while.
guitarlimeo 12 hours ago||
Alert me when these "world models" can make a video of a skateboarding line that fools a skateboarder.

And no, this didn't: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2K_OLiZ_RM

bubblegumcrisis 11 hours ago|
I watched all of that video, it was really good.
mlmonkey 16 hours 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.
Bjorkbat 13 hours ago||
This is a reflection of a complaint I frequently make about so called "world models". It's more accurate to call them video game models. They don't simulate the world, they simulate video games. For that reason a common issue with them is that the physics are video game physics rather than real world physics.
rcoveson 10 hours ago||
I'm sure you're probably right about video games being used in training and, as a result, the models reflecting video game physics: No air resistance, no static/dynamic friction curve, etc.

However, I don't think that's the problem in the example of the marble bust not toppling. It would have toppled in a video game engine as well; they model gravity and inertia just fine.

I think what's happening is the model isn't being a world model at all, it's being a language model. It's trying to make the "scripted" thing happen, and it probably "feels" like the script should end in the bust on the pedestal.

monk_grilla 9 hours ago||
Yes this is right. Something about the way it works under the hood means it wants: 1. bust falls 2. it crushes the watermelon 3. it teeters 4. it settles on the plinth. It is sort of interpolating between these states, which it feels are a realistic sequence of events, not actually attempting to model what would happen in a real "world".
sobellian 14 hours ago|||
It also failed to properly model the physics of knights riding wyverns into battle.
modeless 14 hours ago||
Which is fine for a video game. Not at all fine if you want to train robots with it. Trying to combine both use cases into a single model is doomed to failure IMO.
sobellian 13 hours ago|||
I would not be so opinionated, modern coding agents derive from chatbot technology. Very different problem domain. They share language but language is universal so that doesn't say much. Then they figured out that the pretraining is a good starting point for RLVR. Who's to say a more cinematic imagination can't be a good starting point for a world model? It doesn't need to be the whole solution.
drewbeck 13 hours ago|||
If they don’t get ahead of this our robots are going to be sitting ducks against knights riding wyverns smh
extraextra 9 hours ago|||
People are arguing if the marble bust should've toppled over or not, completely missing the fact that marble is brittle and the bust would have surely cracked
peddling-brink 15 hours ago|||
How often do things in the real world not behave exactly as you expected them to?

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.

bigwheels 14 hours ago|||
Busts rarely hang in midair at a 45° angle.

As an aside, why fall into the role of being an apologist for google-hype and Big Tech?

peddling-brink 4 hours ago||
You're missing the forest for the trees. The less than amazing physics isn't the point.

When you have a conversation, you have an idea in your mind of how the conversation is going to go. You predict what the other person is going to say before they say it.

When you are driving, you predict what the other drivers are going to do, you predict what signs say, how long you have until the green. If you see two red lights attached to the back of a car flash on, you may predict that the car is about to slow down and you start slowing down before their speed has changed.

Forget video games and movies. I believe these models will be that inner predictive model for robots.

mlmonkey 12 hours ago|||
> How often do things in the real world not behave exactly as you expected them to?

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.

peddling-brink 4 hours ago||
Your expectation is the point, not the physics. I'm not arguing that their model has an amazing grasp of physics. I'm arguing that this can be used as a predictive internal model for a robot.
StilesCrisis 12 hours ago|||
I agree but I feel like the exaggerated physics were intentional and fitting with the video theme. If they had wanted it to topple, they wouldn't have posted the video.
dsissitka 15 hours ago|||
They were demonstrating steering.
stevemk14ebr 14 hours ago||
So what, the world model failed to model physics. The thing they said it did elsewhere. It's a valid critique
spwa4 15 hours ago|||
That's the thing about machine learning over time, and the big hole in the whole world model idea. Time and time again we make simulations and train models and we think that loop will work. It never does.

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.

Closi 13 hours ago||
It depends if the goal is a more accurate simulation, or if the goal is a tool for creatives to build games or content.

If it's the latter, I don't see a 'hole'.

spwa4 13 hours ago||
My point was that there is also the possibility of AI intelligence improving to the point that there isn't a difference anymore. That whatever beats the next set of benchmarks (which of course won't be the simulator or world model) is so smart it is both a better solution to the problem the world simulator poses and a better world simulator all in one and a better tool for creatives to build games or content.

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.

Closi 11 hours ago||
Its easy to see what works in hindsight, but in reality with this sort of research you have to find an approach that’s working and keep pushing it and see where it goes.

The results so far from genie have been stunning, and its not obvious to me that another approach is guaranteed to end up better for all use cases.

pcurve 13 hours ago||
yes. I feel Google's video physics has always been bad. slow, aritifical, unnatural.
runtime_terror 15 hours 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 15 hours 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.

andoando 15 hours ago||
I thought that was pretty cool.
toephu2 6 hours ago|||
But remember, today is the worst the models will ever be. I agree they are still safe though... they will probably use AI to make even more films faster and more creative since it enables them to do more.
phainopepla2 15 hours ago||
It was the complete lack of fear or urgency on the part of the characters for me.
shwaj 13 hours ago||
It was their eyeballs not drying out or squinting due to the wind for me.
germanjoey 15 hours 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
TGower 16 hours 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.
manlymuppet 12 hours ago|
What if we're all in Genie 10 right now?
bottlepalm 12 hours ago||
Isn't that a simpler explanation of reality than the zillions of particles all existing simultaneously in this massive universe?

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.

smokel 11 hours ago|||
Simplicity is only relevant to humans (and other animals that evolved into trying to forecast their survival). Most of the universe seems to prefer chaos. So no, from a universal perspective, there is no reason for reality to be simple or elegant.
bottlepalm 4 hours ago||
Really? I thought the universe boiled down to a few fundamental forces as it is.
nfw2 9 hours ago|||
explains how fringe details don't make sense, like no one knowing what oracle does exactly
thunky 6 hours ago||
Maybe Oracle is running Genie 10
butlike 12 hours ago||
Yeah 2020 was the upload point when we were all corralled during covid. And trees were the data centers of the dinosaurs. I mean, what if?
More comments...