Elon Musk, Demis Hassabis Collaborate to Build an AI Game

Google DeepMind recently introduced Genie 2, a large-scale foundation world model capable of generating a wide variety of playable 3D environments. Genie 2 facilitates the development of embodied AI agents by transforming a single image into interactive virtual worlds that can be explored by humans or AI using standard keyboard and mouse controls.

“Genie 2 could enable future agents to be trained and evaluated in a limitless curriculum of novel worlds. This research also paves the way for new, creative workflows for prototyping interactive experiences,” Google Deepmind said in its blog post.

Introducing Genie 2: our AI model that can create an endless variety of playable 3D worlds - all from a single image. 🖼️

These types of large-scale foundation world models could enable future agents to be trained and evaluated in an endless number of virtual environments. →… pic.twitter.com/qHCT6jqb1W

— Google DeepMind (@GoogleDeepMind) December 4, 2024

“The world model is taking shape,” said Google DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis in a post on X.

X chief Elon Musk replied, “Cool,” to which Hassabis responded, “Thanks, Elon! Let’s do an AI game together…”

“Ok, that would be cool”, said Musk.

Musk, an avid gamer, recently shared that xAI is starting an AI-based game studio. “Too many game studios are owned by massive corporations. @xAI is going to start an AI game studio to make games great again!” he posted on X.

Interestingly, during a surprise appearance on the Joe Rogan Podcast, Elon Musk shared that he is one of the top 20 ‘Diablo 4’ players worldwide.

Not many know that Elon Musk, as an intern many summers ago, wrote the software for video games at a company called Rocket Science. This was long before SpaceX was even conceived. 

While Musk is focusing on FSD and Optimus, pivoting to video games and entertainment seems like a promising prospect. And while OpenAI hasn’t released Sora yet, Musk said that Tesla has already been doing real-world video generation with accurate physics for about a year. 

Earlier this year, Musk shared Tesla’s video generation capabilities, to which a user replied, “Tesla should make a video game.” Musk instantly responded, “I’ve wanted to do that for a long time :).”

He said that while Tesla’s real-world simulation and video-generation capabilities are the best in the world, making a game can only come after they release unsupervised FSD, which is far safer than supervised FSD.

xAI plans to expand its Colossus Supercomputer in Memphis, adding more than 1 million GPUs, the Greater Memphis Chamber revealed today. Already the world’s largest with 100,000 GPUs, Colossus will soon grow tenfold, thanks to an investment of tens of billions from Elon Musk.

Also, xAI is preparing to launch a standalone app for its Grok AI chatbot, expected as early as December 2024, to challenge OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. The company is also set to initiate a new $5 billion fundraising round, which could double its valuation to $50 billion within six months. Previously, xAI raised $6 billion in Series B funding, bringing its post-money valuation to $24 billion.