\n<\/p>\n
Google DeepMind is assembling a new team of artificial intelligence researchers to develop \u201cworld models\u201d that can simulate physical environments. The initiative will be led by Tim Brooks, a former co-lead for OpenAI\u2019s Sora project who joined DeepMind in October<\/a> to work on Google\u2019s video generation and world simulators.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n World models are a relatively new development within AI that could serve a variety of purposes, such as creating real-time interactive media environments for video games and movies, and realistic training scenarios for robots and other AI systems. It\u2019s also part of Google\u2019s push to achieve an artificial general intelligence system, or AGI, before its competitors.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cDeepMind has ambitious plans to make massive generative models that simulate the world,\u201d Brooks announced in an X post on Monday<\/a>. Brooks included two open job listings for research engineers and scientists who will help to advance AI \u201cworld models\u201d capable of simulating real-world scenarios by solving problems around training \u201cat massive scale,\u201d curating training data, and studying how they can be integrated with multimodal language models.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cWe believe scaling pretraining on video and multimodal data is on the critical path to artificial general intelligence,\u201d DeepMind said in the job descriptions<\/a>. \u201cWorld models will power numerous domains, such as visual reasoning and simulation, planning for embodied agents, and real-time interactive entertainment.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The race to be the first to declare AGI is heating up, so Google\u2019s focus here isn\u2019t surprising. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said<\/a> that the company has cracked how to achieve the tech industry\u2019s long-sought benchmark, and that autonomous AI agents may start to meaningfully join workforces this year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The new DeepMind team will work alongside existing Google AI projects including its flagship Gemini AI models, Veo video generator<\/a>, and Genie<\/a> \u2014 Google\u2019s prior world model for simulating playable 3D environments in real-time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n