Genie 3: A new frontier for world models

But that was always going to be the case?

Reality is not composed of words, syntax, and semantics. A human modal is.

Other human modals are sensory only, no language.

So vision learning and energy models that capture the energy to achieve a visual, audio, physical robotics behavior are the only real goal.

Software is for those who read the manual with their new NES game. Where are the words inside us?

Statistical physics of energy to make machine draw the glyphs of language not opionated clustering of language that will close the keyboard and mouse input loop. We're like replicating human work habits. Those are real physical behaviors. Not just descriptions in words.

I similarly am surprised at how fast they are progressing. I wrote this piece a few months ago about how I think steering world model output is the next realm of AAA gaming:

https://kylekukshtel.com/diffusion-aaa-gamedev-doom-minecraf...

But even when I wrote that I thought things were still a few years out. I facetiously said that Rockstar would be nerd-sniped on GTA6 by a world model, which sounded crazy a few months ago. But seeing the progress already made since GameNGen and knowing GTA6 is still a year away... maybe it will actually happen.

Bitter lesson strikes again!

> Future robots may learn in their dreams...

So prescient. I definitely think this will be a thing in the near future ~12-18 months time horizon

So this just happened from scaling the model

Unbelievable. How is this not a miracle? So we're just stumbling onto breakthroughs?

The guy who tried was invite by Google to try it.

He seems to me too enthusiastic, such that I feel Google asked him in particular because they trusted him to write very positively.

> this is a clear glimpse into the future.

Not for video games it isn’t.

Regarding latency, I found a live video of gameplay here [1] and it looks like closer to 1.1s keypress-to-photon latency (33 frames @ 30fps) based on when the onscreen keys start lighting up vs when the camera starts moving. This writeup [2] from someone who tried the Genie 3 research preview mentions that "while there is some control lag, I was told that this is due to the infrastructure used to serve the model rather than the model itself" so a lot of this latency may be added by their client/server streaming setup.

[1] https://x.com/holynski_/status/1952756737800651144

[2] https://togelius.blogspot.com/2025/08/genie-3-and-future-of-...

And made hands 10x worse. Now hands are good, text is good, image is good, so we’ll have to play where’s Waldo all over again trying to find the flaw. It’s going to eventually get to a point where it’s one of those infinite zoom videos where the AI watermark is the size of 1/3rd of a pixel.

What I’d really love to see more of is augmented video. Like, the stormtrooper vlogs. Runway has some good stuff but man is it all expensive.

I wouldn't say that the text problem has been fully fixed. It has certainly gotten a lot better, but even gpt-image-1 still fails occasionally when generating text.

Note that the prompt and the generated chalkboard disagree on whether there's a dash or not.

I'm one of those excited people! We haven't lost anything with this new technology, only gained.

The way I see it, most people aren't creative. And the people who are creatives are mostly creating for the love of it. Most books that are published are read exclusively by the friends and family of the author. Most musicians, most stand-up comedians, most artist get to show off their works for small groups of people and make no money doing so. But they do it anyway. I draw terrible portraits, make little inventions and sometimes I build something for the home, knowing full well that I do these things for my own enjoyment and whatever ego boost I get from showing these things off to people I know.

I'm doing a marathon later and I've been working my ass off for the prospect of crossing the finishing line as number four thousand and something, and I'll do it again next year.

> I don't think there was ever a period of time where creative works were just created for sake of itself rather for sharing it with others at masse.

Numerous famous writers, painters, artists, etc counter this idea, Kafka being a notable example, whose significant works only came to light after his passing and against his will. This doesn't take away from the rest of your discussion point, but art always has and always will also exist solely for its own sake.

> I don't buy argument from people who are saying they are excited to live in this age

What argument is required for excitement? Excitement is a feeling not a rational act. It comes from optimism and imagination. There is no argument for optimism. There is often little reason in imagination.

> How to even find the value in living given all of that?

You might have heard of the Bhagavad Gita, a 2000+ year old spiritual text. It details a conversation between a warrior prince and a manifestation of God. The warrior prince is facing a very difficult battle and he is having doubts justifying any action in the face of the decisions he has to make. He is begging this manifestation of God to give him good reasons to act, good reasons not just to throw his weapons down, give away all his possessions and sit in a cave somewhere.

There are no definite answers in the text, just meditations on the question. Why should we act when the result is ultimately pointless, we will all die, people will forget you, situations will be resolved with or without you, etc.

This isn't some new question that LLMs are forcing us to confront. LLMs are just providing us a new reason to ask the same age-old questions we have been facing for as long as writing has existed.

Today physical world is largely mechanized, we rarely walk, run lift heavy things for survival. So we grow fat and weak unless we exercise. Tomorrow vast majority of us will never think, create, investigate for earning a living. So we will get dumb and dumber over time. A small minority of us will keep polishing their intellect but will never be smarter than machines just like the best athletes of today can't outrun machines.

I don't understand your argument at all. I've made hundreds of songs in my life that I haven't shared with anyone and so have all other musicians I know. The act of creating is separate from finding or having an audience. In fact, I would say that the complete opposite of what you say is true.

And even so, music production has been a constant evolution of replacing prior technologies and making it easier to get into. It used to be gatekept by expensive hardware.

We already live in a world where a vast library of songs by musicians who play much better than you are readily available on YouTube and Spotify. This seems like more of the same?

I don't know how on Earth people can think like this. Most people can find "value" in a slice of pizza. It doesn't even have to be a good pizza.

Or kittens and puppies. Do you think there won't be kittens and puppies?

And that's putting aside all the obvious space-exploration stuff that will probably be more interesting than anything the previous 100 billion humans ever saw.

The question is, why are you doing art?

- Because you enjoy it

- Because you get pats in the back from people you share it with

- Because you want to earn money from it

The 1st one will continue to be true in this dystopian AI art future, the other not so much.

And sincerely I find that kind of human art, the one that comes from a pure inner force, the more interesting one.

EDIT: list formatting

If you take the idea of it needing to be a constructed simulation you get the dream argument. If you add that one can't verify anyone else having subjective experience you get Boltzmann brain. If you add the idea that maybe the ancestor simulations are designed to teach us virtuous behavior through repeated visits to simulation worlds you get the karmic cycle, and Boltzmann brain + karmic cycle is roughly the egg theory.

I think some/all of these things can roughly true at the same time. Imagine an infinite space full of chaotic noise that arises a solitary Boltzmann brain, top level universe and top level intelligence. This brain, seeking purpose and company in the void, dreams of itself in various situations (lower level universes) and some of those universes' societies seek to improve themselves through deliberate construction of karmic cycle ancestor simulation. A hierarchy of self-similar universes.

It was incredibly comforting to me to think that perhaps the reason my fellow human beings are so poor at empathy, inclusion, justice, is that this is a karmic kindergarten where we're intended to be learning these skills (and the consequences for failing to perform them) and so of course we're bad at it, it's why we're here.

Consistent output and spatial coherence across each eye, maybe a couple years? But meeting head tracking accuracy and latency requirements, I’d bet decades. There’s no way any of this tech reduces end to end latency to acceptable levels, without a massive change in hardware. We’ll probably see someone use reprojection techniques in a year or so and claim they’ve done it. But true generated pixels straight to the headset based on head tracking, is so so far away.

It's hard to get an acceptable VR output for today's rendering engines still. In the examples provided, the movement seems to be slow and somewhat linear, which doesn't translate to head movements in VR. VR needs 2 consistent videos with much higher resolutions and low latency is a must. The feedback would still be very dependent on people's tolerance to all imperfections - some would be amazed, others would puke. That's why VR still isn't in the spotlight after all the years (I personally find it great).

I think VR will come at the same time they make multiplayer. There needs to be differentiation between the world-state and the viewport. Right now, I suspect they're the same.

But once you can get N cameras looking at the same world-state, you can make them N players, or a player with 2 eyes.