YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Stadia is dead, the reason is playing games over the internet sucks, input lag and serious graphics degradation - this is why I cancelled

Ai generated games suck even more, no skill; no taste, there is no TLC put into them

Then there is the economics of it, cost prohibitive to (re)generate a scene and ship that over internet pipes

Game industry is still struggling to find a way to incorporate regular LLMs without suffering catastrophic edge cases. A long way to go before these can do more than fancy tech demo, I think.

And? Just spin up some open world model and pay for the compute and play your own games?

There are so many options for games now that just sticking with the biggest AAA companies seems like a waste.

Why? Why would a non-deterministic engine be better for a game when it can be instead structured and made deterministic and then more effectively distributed to consumer hardware?

They can try, my household won't be purchasing those.

We'll be riding the huge wave of indie titles that are incoming.

And nobody will play that trash, and the world won't change.

Also, lmao, they're already trying to nickel and dime you and sell you microtransactions that took 5 minutes to make for 10 bucks. If you think they're going to pay the costs for running a world model for every single person, lol.

Because stadia was a real banger right?

Do you have even the slightest idea of the level of expectation that even the most casual gamer has?

This isn’t achieving much beyond prototyping. They’re burning so much money for no reason.

Because it wasn’t bad enough to need a $5000 5090 to play a game, now you’re going to need a full rack of them!

another POV is, what even are these experiences? whom are they for? it would take Google 10 minutes to hire all the best game developers for Android, and cost them like $2m, which is peanuts, and give them fancy Google Research titles. but instead, they're trying to get 100 google PMs, who don't give their kids screentime and who don't play any games the objective of making a product for Bart Simpsons. like these people don't realize that being good parents disqualifies them from making immersive first person shooter, "narrative" experiences.

I wonder if that's because the target audience is people directing/producing (commercial) videos, rather than games.

They're not proof-reading the blog posts either. The second sentence:

> Genie 4 is natively multimodal, enabling audio-like music, ambient noises, and interactive dialogue to be simultaneously generated with the world.

(Emphasis mine). Like, yeah, I'd sure hope the music is similar to audio.

I wonder if this was a de-LLMese pass gone wrong, and the original was "enabling audio -- like music, ambient noises, and interactive dialogue -- to be simultaneously generated with the world.

The volume of content on YouTube is enormous, I’m kind of surprised they offer auto captions at all given that they have little to no competition in the space.

Typos mean the text came from a human.

ironically, the word "realistic" appears next to game footage, not next to real one.

That's the thing about machine learning over time, and the big hole in the whole world model idea. Time and time again we make simulations and train models and we think that loop will work. It never does.

And why not? Because the first model that can actually learn to handle the simulation not only can do the simulation internally too, but it can do it better than out simulation.

It's where (ex-)"AI luminaries" go to die. It's a way to make glacial, slow progress in the correct direction while never actually getting anywhere.

So we get to a point and people keep making complicated simulations of one kind or another ... and then someone (some model) who's never used the simulation, and doesn't need it for model training gets by far the highest score on every benchmark and everyone agrees the simulation was kind of beside the point.

They were demonstrating steering.

I was under the impression he has already fly past the catapult.

That entire clip looks like it's straight out of a complete bargain-bin videogame. The weird smoothness of the ride, the pivot in mid air, the wings apparently don't have collision with the poles they fly past.

Definitely wouldn't have been one of my picks to show off my fancy new model.

It prompts "gigantic alien tentacles that destroy the world."

I suspect you're reading the base prompt, but the video also demonstrates adding further prompts to change what is happening as the scene progresses.

What an insane set of requirements for a frontier technology and your excitement by it.

> "which is safetymaxxed to the limit,"

I feel refusal'd just *looking* at this page.

I don't get how Google is so horrible at product. Let me play with this. Otherwise it's DOA.

You could produce a thousand cheap ads for your product or one expensive real ad.

You could produce immersive VR content specified only by prompts and in which any action is possible.

Not sure if you're joking, but the only such evidence I could think of would be something like finding some way to influence the hardware of our simulation and seeing a glitch in our world

How does that argument work? I've seen more than a few advances, yet I don't see how any of it provides evidence that we are simulations. This might be one of those things that comes down to the definition of "simulation" I guess.

No it doesn't, not even close. You are looking at a video represented as pixels changing on a flat screen. None of it actually exists. You exist, the computer or phone in front of you is composed of mass and energy, and absolutely none of it is algorithmic. World models, as complex as they are, are still just pushing numbers around on paper.

Even if we can show that it is technically possible to model a universe like ours to the degree that our current perception of reality suggests exists, there are three other big factors that would need to be weighed:

Is it feasible? What Dyson sphere level of power would be needed to maintain such a simulation? Is that level of energy available to whomever is running the simulation?

Is there a positive ROI? What does this advanced civilization get out of running such an expensive simulation?

Is it moral? The simulation involves sentient creatures who are capable of deeply contemplating their own existence, capable of feeling rapturous pleasure and indescribable pain and loss, and ostensibly capable of making moral choices that range from heroic to depraved. Doesn't there come a point where the beings in a simulation are so close to the beings in "base reality" that the same moral principles apply? If you press a button that kicks off a simulation where humans can torture and murder each other, behaving essentially identically to humans in "base reality," aren't you in some sense facilitating those deaths?

probably meant "audio like music, ambient noises, and interactive dialogue."

Audio like: music, ambient-noises etc

As opposed to video-like music...

That was probably meant to be an em-dash, or have spaces around the hyphen.

And their most impactful application will be training smaller models for military drones to detect, target and kill humans. sigh...

Every time I'm about to be excited about AI the cynic in me slaps me back to reality. I imagine the endless possibilities of AI for disabled people, then realize that it's going to leave millions of people disabled instead.

> Sometimes I really wanna skip 10 years into the future and see where all this eventually leads.

Sounds glib, but honestly ... more Ads :/

> movies are going to become video games and video games are going to become something unimaginably better

This is the kind of detached from reality, devoid of humanity statement only a tech bro could come up with.

Why wait? It's become very clear already: https://kotaku.com/the-proliferation-of-copycats-on-steam-ma...

Instead of better it's become unimaginably worse since games can no longer serve as a means of self expression because the second you express anything worthwhile 100 people copy it immediately ... without you. It's like Disney (whose whole business model is copying public domain stories and music and ... but taking out the source and everyone who ever had anything to do with it). Except there's no longer one highly selective company destroying the world's culture one piece at a time, but 10000000 idiots looking to make a quick buck, destroying culture and self-expression like a fire raging in the rainforest.

So, people will be able to completely skip living in the real world, and instead spend their entire time plugged into a simulation, like a vegetable.

Sounds wonderful. May as well skip this and just spend my life hooked up to an IV drip of drugs.

I guess we'll find out when they publish it.