Comment by phailhaus

This was a common argument against LLMs, that the space of possible next tokens is so vast that eventually a long enough sequence will necessarily decay into nonsense, or at least that compounding error will have the same effect.

Problem is, that's not what we've observed to happen as these models get better. In reality there is some metaphysical coarse-grained substrate of physics/semantics/whatever[1] which these models can apparently construct for themselves in pursuit of ~whatever~ goal they're after.

The initially stated position, and your position: "trying to hallucinate an entire world is a dead-end", is a sort of maximally-pessimistic 'the universe is maximally-irreducible' claim.

The truth is much much more complicated.

[1] https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2512.03750

Imo they explain pretty well what they are trying to achieve with SIMA and Genie in the Google Deepmind Podcast[1]. They see it as the way to get to AGI by letting AI agents learn for themselves in simulated worlds. Kind of like how they let AlphaGo train for Go in an enormous amount of simulated games.

[1] https://youtu.be/n5x6yXDj0uo

Take the positive spin. What if you could put in all the inputs and it can simulate real world scenarios you can walk through to benefit mankind e.g disaster scenarios, events, plane crashes, traffic patterns. I mean there's a lot of useful applications for it. I don't like the framing at this time, but I also get where it's going. The engineer in me is drawn to it, but the Muslim in me is very scared to hear anyone talk about creating worlds.... But again I have to separate my view from the reality that this could have very positive real world benefits when you can simulate scenarios. So I could put in a 2 pager or 10 page scenario that gets played out or simulated and allow me to walk through it. Not just predictive stuff but let's say things that have happened so I can map crime scenes or anything. In the end this performance art is because they are a product company being Benchmarked by wall street and they'll need customers for the technology but at the same time they probably already have uses for it internally.

An hybrid approach could maybe work, have a more or less standard game engine for coherence and use this kind of generative AI more or less as a short term rendering and physics sim engine.

Why is it a dead end, you don’t meaningfully explain that. These models look like you can interact with them and they seem to replicate physics models.

As a kid in the early 1980s, I spent a lot of time experimenting with computers by playing basic games and drawing with crude applications. And it was fun. I would have loved to have something like Google's Genie to play with. Even if it never evolved, the product in the demos looks good enough for people to get value from.

It's been very profitable for drug dealers for centuries, who wouldn't want a piece of that market?

  > Why are they not training models to help write games instead?

  | It simulates physics and interactions for dynamic worlds, while its breakthrough consistency enables the simulation of any real-world scenario — from robotics and modelling animation and fiction, to exploring locations and historical settings.

Same with Nvidia's Earth 2 and Cosmos (and a bit like Isaac). Games or VR environments are not the primary drive, the primary drive is training robots (including non-humanoids, such as Waymo) and just getting the data. It's exactly because of this that perfect physics (or let's be honest, realistic physics[0,1]). Getting 50% of the way there in simulation really does cut down the costs of development, even if we recognize that cost steepens as we approach "there". I really wish they didn't call them "world models" or more specifically didn't shove the word "physics" in there, but hey, is it really marketing if they don't claim a golden goose can not only lay actual gold eggs but also diamonds and that its honks cure cancer?

[0] Looking right does not mean it is right. Maybe it'll match your intuition or undergrad general physics classes with calculus but talk to a real physicist if you doubt me here. Even one with just an undergrad will tell you this physics is unrealistic and any one worth their salt will tell you how unintuitive physics ends up being as you get realistic, even well before approaching quantum. Go talk to the HPC folks and ask them why they need superocmputers... Sorry, physics can't be done from observation alone.

[1] Seriously, I mean look at their demo page. It really is impressive, don't get me wrong, but I can't find a single video that doesn't have major physics problems. That "A high-altitude open world featuring deformable snow terrain." looks like it is simulating Legolas[2], not a real person. The work is impressive, but it isn't anywhere near realistic https://deepmind.google/models/genie/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4ZYzbKaVyQ