Google is building a ‘world modeling’ AI team for games and robots

Google DeepMind is bringing together a new team of artificial intelligence researchers to develop “world models” that can simulate physical environments. The initiative will be led by Tim Brooks, a former co-lead for OpenAI’s Sora project who joined DeepMind in October to work on the generation of Google videos and world simulators.

World models are a relatively new development in AI that could serve a variety of purposes, such as creating real-time interactive media environments for video games and movies, and realistic training scenarios for robots and other AI systems. It’s also part of Google’s push to get an artificial general intelligence, or AGI, system before its competitors.

“DeepMind has ambitious plans to make massive generative models that simulate the world,” Brooks announced in an X post on Monday. Brooks has included two open job listings for research engineers and scientists who will help advance AI “world models” capable of simulating real-world scenarios by solving problems around training “at massive scale,” the care of training data, and studying how they can be integrated. with multimodal language patterns.

“We believe that the scale of pretraining on video and multimodal data is on the critical path for artificial general intelligence,” DeepMind said in the job descriptions. “World models power numerous domains, such as visual reasoning and simulation, planning for embodied agents, and real-time interactive entertainment.”

The race to be the first to claim AGI is heating up, so Google’s focus here is not surprising. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said recently that the company has figured out how to achieve the technology industry’s long-sought benchmark, and that autonomous AI agents could begin to significantly join the workforce this year.

The new DeepMind team will work alongside existing Google AI projects including its flagship Gemini AI models, I see the video generatorand genius – Google’s previous world model for simulating real-time playable 3D environments.