Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Yes, and it’s very interesting, even if you were to ask me five, 10 years ago, I would’ve said, even though I was immersed in all of this, I would’ve said, “Well, yeah, you probably need to understand intuitive physics. If I push this off the table, this glass, it will maybe shatter and the liquid will spill out. So we know all of these things.” But I thought that, and there’s a lot of theories in neuroscience, it’s called action in perception where you need to act in the world to really, truly perceive it in a deep way. And there was a lot of theories about you’d need embodied intelligence or robotics or something, or maybe at least simulated action so that you would understand things like intuitive physics. But it seems like you can understand it through passive observation, which is pretty surprising to me. And again, I think hints at something underlying about the nature of reality in my opinion, beyond just the cool videos that it generates. And of course there’s next stages is maybe even making those videos interactive so one can actually step into them and move around them, which would be really mind-blowing, especially given my games background. So you can imagine. And then I think we’re starting to get towards what I would call a world model, a model of how the world works, the mechanics of the world, the physics of the world, and the things in that world. And of course that’s what you would need for a true AGI system. I have to talk to you about video games. So you are being a bit trolley. I think you’re having more and more fun on Twitter, on X, which is great to see. So a guy named Jimmy Apples tweeted, “Let me play a video game of my Veo 3 videos already. Google cooked so good. Playable world models wen?” And then you co-tweeted that with, “Now, wouldn’t that be something?” So how hard is it to build game worlds with AI? Maybe can you look out into the future feature of video games five, 10 years out? What do you think that looks like? Well, games were my first love really. And doing AI for games was the first thing I did professionally in my teenage years and with the first major AI systems that I built and I always want to scratch that itch one day and come back to that. And I will do, I think, and I think I sort of dream about what would I have done back in the nineties if I’d had access to the kind of AI systems we have today? And I think you could build absolutely mind-blowing games. And I think the next stage is I always used to love making, all the games I’ve made are open world games, so they’re games where there’s a simulation and then there’s AI characters, and then the player interacts with that simulation and the simulation adapts to the way the player plays. And I always thought they were the coolest games because, so games like Theme Park that I worked on where everybody’s game experience would be unique to them because you’re kind of co-creating the game. We set up the parameters, we set up initial conditions, and then you as the player immersed in it, and then you are co-creating it with the simulation. But of course it’s very hard to program open world games. You’ve got to be able to create content whichever direction the player goes in, and you want it to be compelling no matter what the player chooses. And so it was always quite difficult to build things like cellular automata actually, type of those kind of classical systems, which created some emergent behavior, but they’re always a little bit fragile, a little bit limited. Now we are maybe on the cusp in the next few years, five, 10 years of having AI systems that can truly create around your imagination, can dynamically change the story and storytell the narrative around and make it dramatic no matter what you end up choosing. So it’s like the ultimate choose your own adventure sort of game. And I think maybe we are within reach, if you think of a kind of interactive version of Veo and then wind that forward five to 10 years and imagine how good it’s going to be.…

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