Google’s release of Genie 3, its world model which creates interactive game words with just a prompt, had sparked plenty of interest, and even given rise to speculation whether such a model proved that we were living inside a simulation. But it turns out that the Genie 3 is being used in conjunction with other AIs in some even more mind-bending ways.
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has revealed that the company is using a game-playing AI agent to play games inside Genie 3, its latest world model. This essentially means that an AI is playing a game in a world that is generated by another AI on the fly, essentially putting an AI inside another AI.
“It’s so exciting in multiple dimensions,” Demis Hassabis said in a podcast. “One of course is we are already using (Genie 3) for our own training. So we have a games playing agent called Sima — simulated agent — that can out of the box take the controls and play at an existing computer game. In some cases, well, in some cases not so well,” he said.
“But actually what’s interesting here is that you can put that Sima agent into Genie 3. So you’ve got basically one AI playing in the mind of another AI. It’s pretty crazy to think about. So Sima is deciding what actions to take and you can give it a goal, like, you know, go and find the key in the room. And then it will sort of send out commands as if it’s playing a normal computer game,” he added.
“But actually at the other end is Genie three generating the world on the fly. So there’s one AI generating the world, and there’s another AI inside of it (playing the game). So it could be really useful for creating sort of unlimited training data. I can imagine that being very useful for things like robotics and just training our general age AI system,” he added.
It’s a pretty mind-bending idea — Google is essentially using an “artificial” agent to play an “artificial” game. The actions of the game-playing agent aren’t predictable, given how it’s an AI, and the game world isn’t predictable either, given how it’s being created by an AI in real time. But these two AI systems are interacting with one another, essentially with one inside the mind of the other. And this isn’t for just fun and games — Google is collecting valuable training data from these examples, which can be used to create AI models that can better model the real world for purposes ranging from robotics to navigation. These are still early days, but as Genie 3’s new use-case shows, AI systems are already being put together and used in ways that would’ve been unthinkable just a few years earlier.