alt Hacker NewsI don't know if I'm missing the point, but Genie 4 almost looks worse than Genie 3 in terms of player control? It doesn't even seem to respond to inputs, it just looks like they took some AI generated videos and put the key widgets on top.
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I think you're exactly right. This was already a problem with Genie 3, but they've appear to have gone all in on video generation over controllability.
The original Genie was a great piece of work with a real sense of purpose - to enable agents to learn about the real world in the way Dreamer or Schmidhuber's paper sketched. But now most of the people that drove that mission have left Deepmind (Jack Parker-Holder, Tim Rocktaschel, Demis) and it's become this instead.
I wonder if that's because the target audience is people directing/producing (commercial) videos, rather than games.
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.
Astonishing to me that a company like Google would be willing to publish such a terrible looking product demo. Interactive, but with completely made-up inputs that are ignored?