The Big Y #300
A whole new world(s)
Hi! 👋 Welcome to The Big Y!
Wow! This is the 300th issue of The Big Y! When I first started writing this newsletter, I never imagined I’d still be at it nearly six years later. A huge thank you to those who have been here since day one, and to everyone who has joined the journey along the way. 💕
Google DeepMind caused an aggressive sell-off of video game stocks last week with the announcement of their new generative world model. Genie 3 is a generative world model that transforms static prompts into fully interactive, digital environments in real time, which is a big step forward from the generative videos we have been seeing.
The generative worlds coming out of Genie 3 are visually stunning and it’s impressive to be able to interact with them directly. But as stocks are tanking, it’s also important to remember that we’re still far away from an actual world game engine. At the moment, Genie is not generating a 3D model, rather it generates the pixels that create the illusion of a 3D model. If you look back in the environment, the system is using short term memory to remember what is around your character.
Knowing that, it’s clear that the stock market is overacting (as it does every time there is AI news), but I think this is the starting shot of something that will change everything in interactive entertainment in general and the game developer world in particular. Inference to support this will be super expensive and a switch to being able to run this on edge devices will unlock a lot of good use cases.
AI has disrupted the video game industry already (28% of game devs have been laid off in the last 24 months) and while the big stock drop might be an overreaction today, it definitely is a warning sign.
The Tidbit: Remember when big tech was all about becoming carbon neutral? Water usage for data center cooling is exploding along with their energy usage, where around two-thirds of the water used evaporates during the cooling process. As the race to build data centers continues, I think we’ll see more community uproar around water and electricity usage since it is a hyper-local issue.
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Thanks for reading! Have a great week! 😁