- Google DeepMind just unveiled Genie 3, its latest world model
- Unlike Genie 2, this model allows for real-time interaction and delivers it all in 720p
- This means you can generate an environment, explore it, and change it on the fly
Google’s AI world model has just received a significant upgrade, as the technology giant, specifically Google DeepMind, is introducing Genie 3. This is the latest AI world model, and it kicks things into the proverbial high gear by letting the user generate a 3D world at 720p quality, explore it, and feed it new prompts to interact or change the environment all in real time.
It’s really neat, and I highly recommend you watch the announcement video from DeepMind that’s embedded below. Genie 3 is also keenly different from, say, the still impressive Veo 3, as it offers video with audio that goes well beyond the 8-second limit. Genie 3 offers multiple minutes of what Google calls the ‘interaction horizon,’ allowing you to interact with the environment in real-time and make adjustments as needed.
It’s sort of like if AI and VR merged; it lets you build a world off a prompt, add new items in, and explore it all. Genie 3 appears to be an improvement over Genie 2, which was introduced in late 2024. In a chart shared within Google’s DeepMind post, you can see the progression from GameNGen to Genie 2 to Genie 3, and even a comparison to Veo.
Google’s also shared a number of demos, including a few that you can try within the blog post, and it’s giving us choose-your-adventure vibes. There are a few different scenes you can try on a snowy hill or even a goal you’d want the AI to achieve within a museum environment.
Google sums it up as, “Genie 3 is our first world model to allow interaction in real-time, while also improving consistency and realism compared to Genie 2.” And while my mind, and my colleague Lance Ulanoff’s, went to interacting in this environment in a VR headset to explore somewhere new or even as a big boon for game developers to test out environments and maybe even characters, Google views this as – no surprise – a step towards AGI. That’s Artificial General Intelligence, and the view here from DeepMind is that it can train various AI agents in an unlimited number of deeply immersive environments within Genie 3.
Another key improvement with Genie 3 is its ability to persist objects within the world – for instance, we observed a set of arms and hands using a paint roller to apply blue paint to a wall. In the clip, we saw a few wide stripes of rolled blue paint on the wall, then turned away and looked back to see the paint marks still in the correct spots.
It’s neat, and similar to some of the object permanence that Apple’s set to achieve with visionOS 26 – of course, that’s overlaying onto your real-world environment, so maybe not quite as impressive.
DeepMind lays out the limitations of Genie 3, noting that in its current version, the world model cannot “simulate real-world locations with perfect geographic accuracy” and that it only supports a few minutes of interaction. Genie 3’s minutes of capability are still a significant jump over Genie 2, but it’s not enabling hours of use.
You also can’t jump into the world of Genie 3 right now. It’s available to a small set of testers. Google does note it’s hoping to make Genie 3 available to other testers, but it’s figuring out the best way to do so. It’s unclear what the interface to interact with Genie 3 looks like at this stage, but from the shared demos, it’s pretty clear that this is some compelling tech.
Whether Google restricts its use to AI research and training, or it explores generating media, I have no doubt we’ll see Genie 4 here in short order … or at least an expansion of Genie 3. For now, I’ll go back to playing with Veo 3.
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