Genie 4 generates playable worlds in real time—two years ago only DOOM was possible
emollick · x · 2026-10-28
Ethan Mollick shares his experience with Google's Genie 4: typing "Neogothic brutalist city inhabited by robots and horses" produces an explorable environment in about a minute, and dragons or an otter NPC can be added in real time. He contrasts this with two years ago, when diffusion-based world models were specialized systems trained on DOOM that rendered a playable game at 20 fps—no generalist world model existed then. The takeaway: world models went from single-game replication to general real-time generation in just two years, still flawed but remarkably fast.
Related event: Ethan Mollick tries Genie 4: playable worlds in a minute(3 posts)→
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