It's pretty incredible a model like Genie can deduce the laws of physics from mere observation of video. Even fluid dynamics which is a notoriously difficult problem. It's not obvious that this would happen or would even be possible from this kind of architecture. It's obviously doing something deep here.

As an aside, I think it's funny that the AI Doomer crowd ignores image and video AI models when it comes to AI models that will enslave humanity. It's not inconceivable that a video model would have a better understanding of the world than an LLM. So perhaps it would grow new capabilities and sprout some kind of intent. It's super-intelligence! Surely these models if trained long enough will deduce hypnosis or some similar kind of mind control and cause mass extinction events.

I mean, the only other explanation why LLMs are so scary and likely to be the AI that kills us all is that they're trained on a lot of sci-fi novels so sometimes they'll say things mimicking sentient life and express some kind of will. But obviously that's not true ;-)

These models aren't rigorously deriving the future state of a system from a quantitative model based in physical theories. Their understanding of the natural environment around is in line the innate understanding that animals and humams have that is based on the experience of living in an environment that follows deterministic patterns. It is easy learn that a river flows faster in the middle by empirical observation. But that is not correlated with a deeper understanding of hydrodynmics.

If you watched Ex Machina, there was a little twist at the end, which basically showed that she ("it," really) was definitely a machine, and had no human "drivers."

I thought that was a clever stroke, and probably a good comment on how we'll be perceiving machines; and how they'll be perceiving us.

I don't know how one would think doomers "ignore image and video AI models". They (Yudkowsky, Hinton, Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander) point at these things all the time.