Google DeepMind has launched a new team focused on building advanced world models. Tim Brooks, formerly of OpenAI’s Sora project, leads the team. These models aim to simulate the physical world and could play a pivotal role in advancing robotics and, potentially, AGI. NVIDIA also announced that open-source world models trained on 20 million hours of video at CES are marking significant progress in this domain.
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One of this year's big areas of Development are World models models that Can understand the physical world around Them key for Robotics and maybe key for AGI as well and Google is Staffing up to Meet the challenge welcome back to the AI Daily Brief headlines Edition all the Daily AI news you need in around 5 Minutes perhaps the biggest theme of Q4 Of last year was this question around Whether the pre-training model for Scaling AI had started to run into Serious limits we obviously got the rise Of reasoning models like 01 and 03 we Had CEOs like sadella from Microsoft Talking about how new architectures were Needed but we also got some interesting Alternatives one of the approaches that Some are interested in are models that Can simulate the physical world Google Is forming a new team within Deep Mind To work on scaling these types of models The team will be led by Tim Brooks one Of the co-leads of open AI Sora video Model who left that company back in October yesterday Brooks posted Deep Mind has ambitious plans to make massive Generative models that simulate the World I'm hiring for a new team with This mission come build with us so far What we've seen from labs are functional If limited demos basically these are AI Models that have a better understanding Of the physics and appearance of the
Real world understanding it in a similar Way to how llms understand the structure Of language so far a lot of what we've Seen from World model labs are based on Training data from video games or movies And so are really only a proof of Concept one of the few projects to move Past this stage was Genesis first shown Off last month that project was able to Generate groundbreaking video and Extremely accurate robotics training Modules using a 4D World simulation Genesis claimed they were able to train Robots 430 times faster than the Previous leading physics simulator Cutting the time below a minute now Deep Mind is one of the labs that published a Brief demo of a model that understands Video game physics last year that model Was called genie2 and I actually think That the announcement went a little Under the radar establishing this new Team suggests that they want to push the Technology even harder job postings for The new team invited applicants to quote Join an ambitious project to build Generative models that simulate the Physical world we We Believe scaling Pre-training on video and multimodal Data is on the critical path to Artificial general intelligence World Models will power numerous domains such As visual reasoning and simulation Planning for embodied agents and
Real-time interactive entertainment the Team will collaborate with and build on Work from Gemini vo and Genie teams and Tackle critical new problems to scale World models to the highest level of Compute one of the people who has talked Most explicitly about this view of the Importance of these types of models for Achieving AGI is meta Chief AI scientist Yan laon indeed he has gone so far as to Hypothesize loudly on Twitter that Standard GPT architecture has no Pathway To AGI this project sounds as though it Will be one of the first to attempt to Build a world model using the full scale Of the training data and compute that Can be mustered by a big Tech firm Nvidia meanwhile is also pushing the Frontier of world models releasing a Family of models called Cosmos during His keynote address at CES which we will Cover in more depth later in the week The Nvidia CEO Jensen hang announced the Chat GPT moment for robotics is coming Like large language models World Foundation models are fundamental to Advance ing robot and AV development yet Not all developers have the expertise And resources to train their own he Demonstrated the model being used to Simulate warehouses and roadways Commenting it's not about generating Creative content but teaching the AI to Understand the physical world the models
Were trained on 20 million hours of Video with a particular focus on human Movements like walking hand movements And manipulating objects they can be Fine-tuned for specific tasks and Customized for external data the family Includes three models ranging from 4 Billion to 14 billion parameters the Smallest model is optimized for low Latency in realtime applications while The largest model is intended to deliver High Fidelity outputs and what's more The models are available as open source For commercial use allowing Robotics and Autonomous vehicle developers to use Them in production Diego odd posted this Is huge for AI democratization a Powerful open source video World model Trained on 20 million hours not just the Model itself but its application to Synthetic data generation could be a Game changer for robotics training one More quick story before we close out the Headlines one of the big questions Surrounding the AI industry is whether It can actually make money you'll Remember that this was a huge point of Conversation last summer we had that Seoa blog post AI $600 billion problem And now we've learned that chat PT Pro The $200 per month tier is not only not A cash grab but is actually not even Paying for itself a couple of days ago Sam Alman tweeted insane thing we are
Currently losing money on openai Pro Subscriptions people use it much more Than we expected in the replies he added I personally chose the price and thought We would make money now of course open AI is making a ton of money but losing More the company reportedly expected Losses of around 5 billion last year on Revenues of 3.7 billion the pricing of All this stuff at any point has been Pretty arbitrary in a recent interview Sam Alman said that when it came to the Main chat PT subscription the company Was tossing it up between $20 and $42 They eventually went with $20 because Quote people thought $42 was a little Too much they were happy to pay $20 Alman continued it was is not a rigorous Hire someone and do a pricing study Thing now what makes this interesting Isn't anything really about open aai Itself it's much more about the question Of the long-term profitability of AI Mojo Flynn writes open AI losing money Is no big surprise but when they're Losing money on a $200 monthly Subscription should tell you there's no Viable ATS scale consumer business model Even Microsoft with a $30 co-pilot Subscription is forced to offer Discounted pricing I don't think it's an Unreasonable concern however I do have a Very different take at I think that we Are extremely early in the life cycle of
AI and the simple reality is the cost of Delivering the service hasn't come down As fast as the demand for using the Service has increased that's an Unsustainable state but unsustainable Doesn't mean an inevitable failure it Means that there's going to need to be a Recalibration already the cost of AI has Come down spectacularly from where it Was a few years ago at least in terms of What you can do with the same amount I Would expect that to continue and I Think that we're going to figure out a Lot more use Case by use case what sort Of business models different performance Levels of AI can support frankly I think This is exactly what venture capital and Risk capital is designed to do it's Designed to allow incredibly promising Innovations the ability to build and get Through these complicated early stages Before these markets get rationalized I Think the speed of adoption of these Tools has taken basically everyone by Surprise and puts additional pressure on This even relative to other Industries Anyway still an interesting story to Watch one that we will keep track of Here for now though that is going to do It for today's AI Daily Brief headlines Edition next up the main episode