Google DeepMind is releasing a new version of its AI “world” model, called Genie 3, capable of generating 3D environments that users and AI agents can interact with in real time. The company is also promising that users will be able to interact with the worlds for much longer than before and that the model will actually remember where things are when you look away from them. World models are a type of AI system that can simulate environments for purposes like education, entertainment, or to help train robots or AI agents. With world models, you give them a prompt and they generate a space that you can move around in like you would in a video game, but instead of the world being handcrafted with 3D assets, it’s all being generated with AI. It’s an area Google is putting a lot of effort into; the company showed off Genie 2 in December, which could create interactive worlds based off of an image, and it’s building a world models team led by a former co-lead of OpenAI’s Sora video generation tool. But the models currently have a lot of drawbacks. Genie 2 worlds were only playable up to a minute, for example. I recently tried “interactive video” from a company backed by Pixar’s cofounder, and it felt like walking through a blurry version of Google Street View where things morphed and changed in ways that I didn’t expect as I looked around.

Full report : Google DeepMind releases its Genie 3 model, which can generate 3D worlds from a prompt and has enough visual memory for a few minutes of continuous interaction.