> I think the purpose of Genie is to be a video game, but it's a video game for AI researchers developing AIs.

Yeah, I think this is what the person above was saying as well. This is what people at google have said already (a few podcasts on gdm's channel, hosted by Hannah Fry). They have their "agents" play in genie-powered environments. So one system "creates" the environment for the task. Say "place the ball in the basket". Genie creates an env with a ball and a basket, and the other agent learns to wasd its way around, pick up the ball and wasd to the basket, and so on. Pretty powerful combo if you have enough compute to throw at it.

Sufficiently informative latents can be decoded into video.

When you simulate a stream of those latents, you can decode them into video.

If you were trying to make an impressive demo for the public, you probably would decode them into video, even if the real applications don't require it.

Converting the latents to pixel space also makes them compatible with existing image/video models and multimodal LLMs, which (without specialized training) can't interpret the latents directly.

Didn’t the original world models paper do some training in latent space? (Edit: yes[1])

I think robots imagining the next step (in latent space) will be useful. It’s useful for people. A great way to validate that a robot is properly imagining the future is to make that latent space renderable in pixels.

[1] “By using features extracted from the world model as inputs to an agent, we can train a very compact and simple policy that can solve the required task. We can even train our agent entirely inside of its own hallucinated dream generated by its world model, and transfer this policy back into the actual environment.”

https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.10122

> you don't need to make a video model. You probably don't need to decode the latents at all.

If you don't decode, how do you judge quality in a world where generative metrics are famously very hard and imprecise? How do you go about integrating RLHF/RLAF in your pipeline if you don't decode, which is not something you can skip anymore to get SotA?

Just look at the companies that are explicitly aiming for robotics/simulation, they *are* doing video models.

> if you wanted imagination you don't need to make a video model. You probably don't need to decode the latents at all.

Soft disagree. What is the purpose of that imagination if not to map it to actual real world outfcomes. For this to compare them to the real world and possibly backpropagate through them you'll need video frames.

If you train a video model, you by necessity train a world model for 3D worlds. Which can then be reused in robotics, potentially.

I do wonder if I can frankenstein together a passable VLA using pretrained LTX-2 as a base.

Sure, but at some point you want humans in the loop i guess?

What model do you need then? If you want 3D real-time understanding of how realities work? Are you focusing on "imagination" in a different abstract way?

Sure, but at some point you want humans in the loop i guess?

I am not sure we are at the "efficiency" phase of this.

Even if you just wire this output (or probably multiples running different counterfactuals) into a multimodal LLM that interprets the video and uses it to make decisions, you have something new.

The good news is we’ll finally have an answer for the Fermi Paradox.

this.

The entertainment industry, as big as it is, just doesn't have as much profit potential as robots and AI agents that can replace human labor. Just look at how Nvidia has pivoted from gaming and rendering to AI.

The other examples you've given are neat, but for players like Google they are mostly an afterthought.

You already can, check out Marble/World Labs, Meshy, and others.

It's not really as much of a boon as you'd think though, since throwing together a 3D model is not the bottleneck to making a sellable video game. You've had model marketplaces for a long time now.

Related: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.03220

This is a paper that recently got popular ish and discusses the counter to your viewpoint.

> Paradox 1: Information cannot be increased by deterministic processes. For both Shannon entropy and Kolmogorov complexity, deterministic transformations cannot meaningfully increase the information content of an object. And yet, we use pseudorandom number generators to produce randomness, synthetic data improves model capabilities, mathematicians can derive new knowledge by reasoning from axioms without external information, dynamical systems produce emergent phenomena, and self-play loops like AlphaZero learn sophisticated strategies from games

In theory yes, something like the rules of chess should be enough for these mythical perfect reasoners that show up in math riddles to deduce everything that *can* be known about the game. And similarly a math textbook is no more interesting than a book with the words true and false and a bunch of true => true statements in it.

But I don't think this is the case in practice. There is something about rolling things out and leveraging the results you see that seems to have useful information in it even if the roll out is fully characterizable.

They have a feature where you can take a photo and create a world from that.

If instead of a photo you have a video feed, this is one step closer to implementing subjective experience.

Given that the video is fully interactive and lets you move around (in a “world” if you will) I don’t think it’s a stretch to call it a world model. It must have at least some notion of physics, cause and effect, etc etc in order to achieve what it does.