This is “GameNGen” (pronounced “game engine”), and is the work of researchers from Google, DeepMind, and Tel Aviv University.
of course this shit came out of israel lmao.
Saw the videos of it in action, and the best way I can describe it is “what it’s like to play Doom in a dream.” The graphics are often fuzzy. The health and ammo counters go weird. Enemies move slowly and fade in and out of existence. Exploded slime barrels respawn when the player’s not looking. Very weird and surreal.
I could see using this tech’s limitations to its advantage, creating strange and uncanny experiences along the lines of LSD: Dream Emulator, if it weren’t so awful for the environment.
EDIT: It was posted to r/singularity lmao
i saw this tweet yesterday and as a game dev and designer it legit made me mad
it’s the same shit AI bros do every time - they have to dumb down the meaning of the thing they’re trying to imitate poorly, because they have to shift the goal posts to pretend that what they do has any legitimacy
this is in no way a game engine, and trying to pretend it is requires abstracting and dumbing down entire fields of study these nerds have never even dipped their toes into
I think they’re aware of how absurd their claims are, but they think that the most important thing is the “potential” for this technology to generalize and eventually come to achieve what they’re promising now. The issue is they’d essentially need AGI to take it from this to a real game engine, and that’s obviously not happening.
I think the funniest part of this is that it still needs an extant game to be trained on and the end result still has no awareness or way of tracking your surroundings.
You literally already have a game that works but instead you want to strap two 4090’s together to play a worse version of that same game with no level design and enemies disappear if you turn around fast enough (the ‘engine’ will quite literally forget about them if they’re off screen)
wow this AI is so great it can very, very poorly imitate images from a 31 year old video game that’s specifically well known for its versatility and ease to port
maybe in a few years AI can catch up to the gaming abilities of a refrigerator
