6 ms·

The dawn of a world simulator

80 points by olivercameron 10mo ago

pedalpete 9mo ago
This looks interesting, but can someone explain to me how this is different from video generators using the previous frames as inputs to expand on the next frame? Is this more than recursive video? If so, how?
- smusamashah 9mo ago
  See the demo on their homepage. Calling it a world simulator is a marketing gimmick. It's a worse video generator but you can interact with it in real time and direct the video a little bit. Next version of this thing will be worth looking, this one isnt.
  - nowittyusername 9mo ago
    There is soo much marketing bs around these things it drives me nuts. and it doesn't help that the large labs and credible individuals like denis use these terms. "world models" are video generator with contextual memory but that term is soo misplaced. when one thinks of a "world model" you expect the thing to be at least be physics engine driven from its foundation, not the other way around where everything is generated and assumed at best.
  - netsharc 9mo ago
    It's plato's cave, but in color! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RWOpQXTltA&t=56s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RWOpQXTltA&t=56s
  - Animats 9mo ago
    > Calling it a world simulator is a marketing gimmick. Yes, it should be called an AI Metaverse. It does do a nice job of short term prediction. That's useful as a component of common sense.
  - vrighter 9mo ago
    why would you assume anything about "the next version"?
    - smusamashah 9mo ago
      Based it on other video models, all the ones I have seen keep improving. This one should too. Infact, Google is doing it already with their Genie (IIRC). That one is high quality and interactive.
superb_dev 9mo ago
None of these examples videos seem like the kind of “experiments” that they’re talking about simulating with these models. I was expecting them to test a simple hypothesis and compare the model results to a real world test
- ainiriand 9mo ago
  It is not a world simulator, looks like a world fantasy.
rmnclmnt 9mo ago
For a minute I was like (spoiler alert) « wow the creepy sci-fi theories from the DEVS tv show is taking place »… then I looked up the video and that’s just video generation at this point
- qingcharles 9mo ago
  That's where this is headed, though. That's the end game.
  - rmnclmnt 9mo ago
    This should be interesting then: we’ll finally be able to assert whether time is deterministic and the future and past can be modelled/predicted (if you’ve seen the show you know what I mean)
    - jaggederest 9mo ago
      I think that's actually already provably false if you're bloody-minded enough. I think the proof lies somewhere like Cantor's diagonalization but applied to reality, something like "if you could produce a model sufficiently complex enough to model the future perfectly it wouldn't fit into this current reality because it would require more than this reality's information" I'm not saying it couldn't be locally violated, but it seems straightforward philosophically that each nesting doll of simulated reality must be imperfect by being less complicated.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
nylonstrung 9mo ago
I can't wait for companies like this to run out of money
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
anigbrowl 9mo ago
This appears to be a simulator that produces only nice things.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 9mo ago
  Only SFW, too
arminiusreturns 9mo ago
I'm doing a metasim in full 3D with physics, I just keep seeing the limitations of the video format too much, but it is amazing when done right. The other biggest concern is licensing of output.
godelski 9mo ago
As a machine learning researcher, I don't get why these are called world models. Visually, they are stunning. But it's nowhere near physical. I mean look at that video with the girl and lion. The tail teleports between legs and then becomes attached to the girl instead of the tiger. Just because the visuals are high quality doesn't mean it's a world model or has learned physics. I feel like we're conflating these things. I'm much happier to call something a world model if its visual quality is dogshit but it is consistent with its world. And I say its world because it doesn't need to be consistent with ours
- nurettin 9mo ago
  > Visually, they are stunning. The input images are stunning, model's result is another disappointing trip to uncanny valley. But we feel Ok as long as the sequence doesn't horribly contradict the original image or sound. That is the world model.
  - godelski 9mo ago
    > But we feel Ok as long as the sequence doesn't horribly contradict the original image or sound. Is the error I pointed out not "horribly contradicting"? > That is the world model. I would say that if it is non-physical[0] then it's hard to call it a /world/ model. A world is consistent and has a set of rules that must be followed. I've yet to see a claimed world model that actually captures this behavior. Yet it's something every game engine[1] gets very well. We'd call it a bad physics engine if they made the same mistakes we see even the most advanced "world models" do. This is part of why I'm trying to explain that visual quality is actually orthogonal. Even old Atari games have consistent world models despite being pixelated. Or think about Mario on the original NES. Even the physics breaking in that game are more edge cases and not the norm. But here, things like the lion's tail is not consistent even to a 2D world. I've never bought the explanation that teleporting in front of and behind the leg is an artifact of embedding 3D into 2D[2] because the issue is actually the model not understanding collision and occlusion. It does not understand how the sections relate to one another in the image. The major problem with these systems is that they just hope that the physics is recovered through enough examples of videos. Yet if one studied physics (beyond your basic college courses) you'd understand the naïveté of that. It took a long time to develop physics due to these specific limitations. These models don't even have the advantage of being able to interact with the environment. They have no mechanisms to form beliefs and certainly no means to test them. It's essentially impossible to develop physics through observation alone [0] with respect to the physics of the world being simulated. I want you distinguish real world physics from /a physics/ [1] a game physics engine is a world model. Which, as in stressing in [0], does not necessarily need follow real world physics. Mistakes happen of course but things are generally consistent. [2] no video and almost no game is purely 2D. They tend to have backgrounds which places some layering but we'll say 2D for convenience and since we have a shared understanding
nl 9mo ago
The reason they are called "world models" is because the internal representation of what they display represents a "world" instead of a video frame or image. The model needs to "understand" geometry and physics to output a video. Just because there are errors in this doesn't mean it isn't significant. If a machine learning model understands how physical objects interact with each other that is very useful.
- PunchyHamster 9mo ago
  I think the reason is "those words look nice on promo material". It is absolutely build to trigger hype from the clueless
- godelski 9mo ago
  > what they display represents a "world" instead of a video frame or image. Do they? I'm unconvinced. The tiger and girl video is the clearest example. Nothing about that seems world representing
- slashdave 9mo ago
  > The model needs to "understand" geometry and physics to output a video. No it doesn't. It merely needs to mimic.
  - IAmGraydon 9mo ago
    Correct. The fact that AI is a black box means we can easily imagine anything we want happening within that box. Or perhaps the more accurate way to say it - AI companies can convince investors of amazing magic happening within that box. With LLMs, we anthropomorphize and imagine it’s thinking. With video models, they’re now trying to convince us that it understands the world. None of these things are true. It’s all an illusion.
    - slashdave 9mo ago
      It's worse than that. It's not a black box. We know how the architecture is constructed. We can read the weights.
LarsDu88 9mo ago
I feel like there's a bit if a disconnect with the cool video demos demonstrated here and say, the type of world models someone like Yann Lecunn is talking about. A proper world model like Jepa should be predicting in latent space where the representation of what is going on is highly abstract. Video generation models by definition are either predicting in noise or pixel space (latent noise if the diffuser is diffusing in a variational encoders latent space) It seems like what this lab is doing is quite vanilla, and I'm wondering if they are doing any sort of research in less demo sexy joint embedding predictive spaces. There was a recent paper, LeJepa from LeCunn and a postdoc that actually fixes many of the mode distribution collapse issues with the Jepa embedding models I just mentioned. I'm waiting on the startup or research group that gives us an unsexy world model. Instead of giving us 1080p video of supermodels camping, gives us a slideshow of something a 6 year old child would draw. That would be a more convincing demonstrator of an effective world model.
- blueblisters 9mo ago
  Dreamer4 (https://danijar.com/project/dreamer4/ https://danijar.com/project/dreamer4/) is a promising direction (by a frontier lab)
- jstanley 9mo ago
  > Video generation models by definition are either predicting in noise or pixel space I don't see that this follows "by definition" at all. Just because your output is pixel values doesn't mean your internal world model is in pixel space.
  - LarsDu88 9mo ago
    You need to train a decoder either end to end or conditioned on latents. In either case the impressiveness of that decoder can be far removed from the effectiveness of your world model or involve no world model at all
    - jstanley 9mo ago
      Making convincing videos of the world without having a world model would be like writing convincing essays about computing without understanding computing.
no_no_no_no 9mo ago
[dead]
zkmon 9mo ago
Please AI - lions have their tail attached to their back, not front. The lion's tail in the video of Girl with a lion is misplaced.
alex1138 9mo ago
I guess this might be a chance to plug the fact that Matrix came up with their own Metaverse thing (for lack of a better word) called Third Room, it represented the rooms you joined as spaces/worlds, they built some limited functionality demos before the funding dried up
jyunth 9mo ago
Interesting. I imagine quite a few issues would seem to stem out of the inherent nature of generative AI, we even see several in these demos themselves. One particularly stood out to me, the one where the man is submerged, and for a good while bubbles come out quite consistently out of his mask, and then suddenly one of the bubbles turn into a jellyfish. At a specific frame, the AI thought it looked more like a jellyfish than a bubble and now the world has a jellyfish to deal with now. It'll surely take a looot of video data, even more than what humans can possibly produce to build a normalized, euclidean, physics adherent world model. Data could be synthetically generated, checked thoroughly and fed to the training process, but at the end of the day it seems.... Wasteful. As if we're looking at a local optima point.
actionfromafar 9mo ago
The videos are like waking up from a dream, monstrous inexplicable details.
mvkel 9mo ago
Given the near-impossibility of predicting something as "simple" as a stock market due to its recursive nature, I'm not sure I see how it would be possible to simulate an infinitely more complicated "world"

80 points by olivercameron 10mo ago

This looks interesting, but can someone explain to me how this is different from video generators using the previous frames as inputs to expand on the next frame? Is this more than recursive video? If so, how?

smusamashah 9mo ago
See the demo on their homepage. Calling it a world simulator is a marketing gimmick. It's a worse video generator but you can interact with it in real time and direct the video a little bit. Next version of this thing will be worth looking, this one isnt.
- nowittyusername 9mo ago
  There is soo much marketing bs around these things it drives me nuts. and it doesn't help that the large labs and credible individuals like denis use these terms. "world models" are video generator with contextual memory but that term is soo misplaced. when one thinks of a "world model" you expect the thing to be at least be physics engine driven from its foundation, not the other way around where everything is generated and assumed at best.
- netsharc 9mo ago
  It's plato's cave, but in color! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RWOpQXTltA&t=56s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RWOpQXTltA&t=56s
- Animats 9mo ago
  > Calling it a world simulator is a marketing gimmick. Yes, it should be called an AI Metaverse. It does do a nice job of short term prediction. That's useful as a component of common sense.
- vrighter 9mo ago
  why would you assume anything about "the next version"?
  - smusamashah 9mo ago
    Based it on other video models, all the ones I have seen keep improving. This one should too. Infact, Google is doing it already with their Genie (IIRC). That one is high quality and interactive.

superb_dev 9mo ago

None of these examples videos seem like the kind of “experiments” that they’re talking about simulating with these models. I was expecting them to test a simple hypothesis and compare the model results to a real world test

ainiriand 9mo ago
It is not a world simulator, looks like a world fantasy.

rmnclmnt 9mo ago

For a minute I was like (spoiler alert) « wow the creepy sci-fi theories from the DEVS tv show is taking place »… then I looked up the video and that’s just video generation at this point

qingcharles 9mo ago
That's where this is headed, though. That's the end game.
- rmnclmnt 9mo ago
  This should be interesting then: we’ll finally be able to assert whether time is deterministic and the future and past can be modelled/predicted (if you’ve seen the show you know what I mean)
  - jaggederest 9mo ago
    I think that's actually already provably false if you're bloody-minded enough. I think the proof lies somewhere like Cantor's diagonalization but applied to reality, something like "if you could produce a model sufficiently complex enough to model the future perfectly it wouldn't fit into this current reality because it would require more than this reality's information" I'm not saying it couldn't be locally violated, but it seems straightforward philosophically that each nesting doll of simulated reality must be imperfect by being less complicated.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

nylonstrung 9mo ago

I can't wait for companies like this to run out of money

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]

anigbrowl 9mo ago

This appears to be a simulator that produces only nice things.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 9mo ago
Only SFW, too

arminiusreturns 9mo ago

I'm doing a metasim in full 3D with physics, I just keep seeing the limitations of the video format too much, but it is amazing when done right. The other biggest concern is licensing of output.

godelski 9mo ago

As a machine learning researcher, I don't get why these are called world models. Visually, they are stunning. But it's nowhere near physical. I mean look at that video with the girl and lion. The tail teleports between legs and then becomes attached to the girl instead of the tiger. Just because the visuals are high quality doesn't mean it's a world model or has learned physics. I feel like we're conflating these things. I'm much happier to call something a world model if its visual quality is dogshit but it is consistent with its world. And I say its world because it doesn't need to be consistent with ours

nurettin 9mo ago
> Visually, they are stunning. The input images are stunning, model's result is another disappointing trip to uncanny valley. But we feel Ok as long as the sequence doesn't horribly contradict the original image or sound. That is the world model.
- godelski 9mo ago
  > But we feel Ok as long as the sequence doesn't horribly contradict the original image or sound. Is the error I pointed out not "horribly contradicting"? > That is the world model. I would say that if it is non-physical[0] then it's hard to call it a /world/ model. A world is consistent and has a set of rules that must be followed. I've yet to see a claimed world model that actually captures this behavior. Yet it's something every game engine[1] gets very well. We'd call it a bad physics engine if they made the same mistakes we see even the most advanced "world models" do. This is part of why I'm trying to explain that visual quality is actually orthogonal. Even old Atari games have consistent world models despite being pixelated. Or think about Mario on the original NES. Even the physics breaking in that game are more edge cases and not the norm. But here, things like the lion's tail is not consistent even to a 2D world. I've never bought the explanation that teleporting in front of and behind the leg is an artifact of embedding 3D into 2D[2] because the issue is actually the model not understanding collision and occlusion. It does not understand how the sections relate to one another in the image. The major problem with these systems is that they just hope that the physics is recovered through enough examples of videos. Yet if one studied physics (beyond your basic college courses) you'd understand the naïveté of that. It took a long time to develop physics due to these specific limitations. These models don't even have the advantage of being able to interact with the environment. They have no mechanisms to form beliefs and certainly no means to test them. It's essentially impossible to develop physics through observation alone [0] with respect to the physics of the world being simulated. I want you distinguish real world physics from /a physics/ [1] a game physics engine is a world model. Which, as in stressing in [0], does not necessarily need follow real world physics. Mistakes happen of course but things are generally consistent. [2] no video and almost no game is purely 2D. They tend to have backgrounds which places some layering but we'll say 2D for convenience and since we have a shared understanding

nl 9mo ago

The reason they are called "world models" is because the internal representation of what they display represents a "world" instead of a video frame or image. The model needs to "understand" geometry and physics to output a video. Just because there are errors in this doesn't mean it isn't significant. If a machine learning model understands how physical objects interact with each other that is very useful.

PunchyHamster 9mo ago
I think the reason is "those words look nice on promo material". It is absolutely build to trigger hype from the clueless
godelski 9mo ago
> what they display represents a "world" instead of a video frame or image. Do they? I'm unconvinced. The tiger and girl video is the clearest example. Nothing about that seems world representing
slashdave 9mo ago
> The model needs to "understand" geometry and physics to output a video. No it doesn't. It merely needs to mimic.
- IAmGraydon 9mo ago
  Correct. The fact that AI is a black box means we can easily imagine anything we want happening within that box. Or perhaps the more accurate way to say it - AI companies can convince investors of amazing magic happening within that box. With LLMs, we anthropomorphize and imagine it’s thinking. With video models, they’re now trying to convince us that it understands the world. None of these things are true. It’s all an illusion.
  - slashdave 9mo ago
    It's worse than that. It's not a black box. We know how the architecture is constructed. We can read the weights.

LarsDu88 9mo ago

I feel like there's a bit if a disconnect with the cool video demos demonstrated here and say, the type of world models someone like Yann Lecunn is talking about. A proper world model like Jepa should be predicting in latent space where the representation of what is going on is highly abstract. Video generation models by definition are either predicting in noise or pixel space (latent noise if the diffuser is diffusing in a variational encoders latent space) It seems like what this lab is doing is quite vanilla, and I'm wondering if they are doing any sort of research in less demo sexy joint embedding predictive spaces. There was a recent paper, LeJepa from LeCunn and a postdoc that actually fixes many of the mode distribution collapse issues with the Jepa embedding models I just mentioned. I'm waiting on the startup or research group that gives us an unsexy world model. Instead of giving us 1080p video of supermodels camping, gives us a slideshow of something a 6 year old child would draw. That would be a more convincing demonstrator of an effective world model.

blueblisters 9mo ago
Dreamer4 (https://danijar.com/project/dreamer4/ https://danijar.com/project/dreamer4/) is a promising direction (by a frontier lab)
jstanley 9mo ago
> Video generation models by definition are either predicting in noise or pixel space I don't see that this follows "by definition" at all. Just because your output is pixel values doesn't mean your internal world model is in pixel space.
- LarsDu88 9mo ago
  You need to train a decoder either end to end or conditioned on latents. In either case the impressiveness of that decoder can be far removed from the effectiveness of your world model or involve no world model at all
  - jstanley 9mo ago
    Making convincing videos of the world without having a world model would be like writing convincing essays about computing without understanding computing.

no_no_no_no 9mo ago

[dead]

zkmon 9mo ago

Please AI - lions have their tail attached to their back, not front. The lion's tail in the video of Girl with a lion is misplaced.

alex1138 9mo ago

I guess this might be a chance to plug the fact that Matrix came up with their own Metaverse thing (for lack of a better word) called Third Room, it represented the rooms you joined as spaces/worlds, they built some limited functionality demos before the funding dried up

jyunth 9mo ago

Interesting. I imagine quite a few issues would seem to stem out of the inherent nature of generative AI, we even see several in these demos themselves. One particularly stood out to me, the one where the man is submerged, and for a good while bubbles come out quite consistently out of his mask, and then suddenly one of the bubbles turn into a jellyfish. At a specific frame, the AI thought it looked more like a jellyfish than a bubble and now the world has a jellyfish to deal with now. It'll surely take a looot of video data, even more than what humans can possibly produce to build a normalized, euclidean, physics adherent world model. Data could be synthetically generated, checked thoroughly and fed to the training process, but at the end of the day it seems.... Wasteful. As if we're looking at a local optima point.

actionfromafar 9mo ago

The videos are like waking up from a dream, monstrous inexplicable details.

mvkel 9mo ago

Given the near-impossibility of predicting something as "simple" as a stock market due to its recursive nature, I'm not sure I see how it would be possible to simulate an infinitely more complicated "world"