alt Hacker NewsI don't know ... it's impressive and all but the result always looks kind of dead.
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It's super cool but I see it as a much more flexible open ended take on the idea of procedurally generated worlds where hard-coded deterministic math and rendering parameters are replaced by prompt-able models.
The deadness you're talking about is there in procedural worlds too, and it stems from the fact that there's not actually much "there." Think of it as a kind of illusion or a magic trick with math. It replicates some of the macro structure of the world but the true information content is low.
Search YouTube for procedural landscape examples. Some of them are actually a lot more visually impressive than this, but without the interactivity. It's a popular topic in the demo scene too where people have made tiny demos (e.g. under 1k in size) that generate impressive scenes.
I expect to see generative AI techniques like this show up in games, though it might take a bit due to their high computational cost compared to traditional procedural generation.
This reminds me of the comments by programmers roughly two years ago:
"Sure it can write a single function but the code is terrible when it tries to write a whole class..."