Google announces Genie, a Model for Generative World-Building (2024)

Welcome Renaissance Creator,

Google is having a big week.

From announcing Gemini, its newest model that was believed to blow GPT-4 out of the water, to announcing a series of free and open source models, to Gemini causing a series of gaffes prompting many people to suggest firing Google’s CEO—there has been a lot going on.

In an effort to divert attention away from disturbing imagery coming from Gemini’s image generation, Google is back today with a new announcement. This one, if it actually works, looks mind-blowing.

Today, Google announced Genie: Generative Interactive Environments.

The One Big Thing

Google wants to be the Main Character of the AI Game

Google is arguably the company with the most to lose in the AI revolution.

While most participants are clamoring to grab a piece of a seemingly infinite pie, the incumbents, especially in the internet search space, have a large business to defend from disruption.

New entrants like ChatGPT and Perplexity have begun to eat into Google’s Search business, and despite however slight that business impact may be yet, the pace of adoption is a real threat. ChatGPT was the fastest growing technology product of all time upon launch and presents a direct threat to the massive moat Google has built around internet search queries. With the barrier to content creation and distribution going to zero, it’s a fair question to ask how relevant direct search will be in the future of the internet.

But Google has a trillion reasons to fight back. And another trillion dollars to fight with.

It turns out that a trillion dollars can create some cool new things, as we have seen in the past week. Google has picked up the pace of their releases, with Gemini, Gemma, and now Genie all coming within a week of each other.

Genie is taking Google’s AI ambitions to the next level.

Google describes it as “a foundation world model trained from Internet videos that can generate an endless variety of playable (action-controllable) worlds from synthetic images, photographs, and even sketches.”

Playable worlds from synthetic images.

According to Google, Genie was fed the following image as input to create a generative world environment:

This was the output (excuse the blurry image):

In a previous issue, we talked about how, with OpenAI’s Sora, everyone in the world can now be a filmmaker with the tools in their pocket and the power of their imagination.

Genie will let everyone become a video game designer, architect, world-builder, and 3D animator, among many other crafts we have not even conceived of yet.

Beyond this, it also offers a new environment for AI agent training in a closed environment before being released into the real world. The demos for this look particularly interesting. Imagine a generative world that is constantly updating and reacting to an agent that lives within the world. Something like Boston Dynamic’s robots, before being thrust into the open world, could interact in a generative world created by Genie where the AIs could interact in a virtual space, expand the limits of testing without real world implications.

The barriers to creation are getting closer and closer to 0. The tools are getting stronger and stronger. There is only one place this leads, and that is an explosion of creativity coming from every corner of the earth.

The Renaissance.

Artists’ Gallery

From 2D image to 3D model using Stable Diffusion:

AI video reel made entirely from Stable Diffusion:

AI Generated Art using Voice Prompting:

Hybrid Animal / Human Portraits (Gallery, click in to see more. Weird af, I won’t lie):

Tools

Must have tools for every Renaissance creator to add to their toolkit:

Deep Tech

The newest and coolest in the research world that you need to know about:

Closing Thought

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