The thought of being to upload a single static image of some scene with a humanoid-like entity in it and then being able to infinitely walk around a procedurally generated world with the same theme is insanely cool.
Still glad I stumbled upon seeing this, regardless of whether it's a marketing tactic. The future is amazing.
It's a blurry copy of existing games. That doesn't mean the tech isn't cool or fun, but it does mean that the claims are wildly overblown currently.
People play games because they’re fun. They’re challenging and entertaining and interesting. Highly subjective. Whether these neural-procedural games will be popular hinges more on whether they’re engaging or repetitive imo.
I think a good rule of thumb when deciding to criticize someone's project is to pretend it was created by your own children or your best friend. Would you be as harsh and close-minded if it were created by someone you love?
But now I can instead play a version of GTA that resembles what dreaming about playing GTA would be like, in which I can press a button and, after 10 seconds of latency, watch my "character" awkwardly walk into a building as the world melts around him, all while consuming literally 100 times the computing resources that the original game required to run. And this is apparently revolutionary.
If this was created by someone I knew, I'd tell them to learn Unity or something and make an actual game.
If you look at it from the perspective of "this is supposed to work like a normal game and it doesn't" it's terrible, if you look at it from the perspective of "I have never seen a game do that and it would be insane/impossible for someone to build that experience normally" then it was a very cool 2 mins of my time.
So I think that the fact that this is so close to a real game engine (if you squint) and combined with one or two other demos that were a little bit more general purpose, is pretty big news. Because it is concrete progress on the path to being able to prompt games into existence the same way we can generate videos, images or HTML/JS etc.
It's a step beyond generating games or other code with LLMs. One can even imagine (maybe) with the right training and architecture, you could prompt your productivity tools into existence -- rendered on the fly frame by frame.
If you keep going, maybe our whole universe is a simulation in some kind of incredible alien neural network or pseudo-reality decompression system.
lianhuiqin•1d ago
daveguy•1h ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Research