Google DeepMind is opening up access to Project Genie, its AI tool for creating interactive game worlds from text prompts or images.
Starting Thursday, Google AI Ultra subscribers in the U.S. can play around with the experimental research prototype, which is powered by a combination of Google’s latest world model Genie 3, its image generation model Nano Banana Pro, and Gemini.
Coming five months after Genie 3’s research preview, the move is part of a broader push to gather user feedback and training data as DeepMind races to develop more capable world models.
World models are AI systems that generate an internal representation of an environment, and can be used to predict future outcomes and plan actions. Many AI leaders, including those at DeepMind, believe world models are a crucial step to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI). But in the nearer term, labs like DeepMind envision a go-to-market plan that starts with video games and other forms of entertainment and branches out into training embodied agents (aka robots) in simulation.
DeepMind’s release of Project Genie comes as the world model race is beginning to heat up. Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs late last year released its first commercial product called Marble. Runway, the AI video generation startup, has also launched a world model recently. And former Meta chief scientist Yann LeCun’s startup AMI Labs will also focus on developing world models.
“I think it’s exciting to be in a place where we can have more people access it and give us feedback,” Shlomi Fruchter, a research director at DeepMind, told TechCrunch via video interview, smiling ear-to-ear in clear excitement over Project Genie’s release.
DeepMind researchers that TechCrunch spoke to were upfront about the tool’s experimental nature. It can be inconsistent, sometimes impressively generating playable worlds, other times producing baffling results that miss the mark. Here’s how it works.
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A claymation-style castle in the sky made of marshmallows and candyImage Credits:TechCrunch
You start with a “world sketch” by providing text prompts …