The model, called GameNGen, was made by Dani Valevski at Google Research and his colleagues, who declined to speak to New Scientist. According to their paper on the research, the AI can be played for up to 20 seconds while retaining all the features of the original, such as scores, ammunition levels and map layouts. Players can attack enemies, open doors and interact with the environment as usual.
After this period, the model begins to run out of memory and the illusion falls apart.
I really hope this doesn’t catch on, Games are already horifically inefficient, imagine if we started making them like this and a 4090 becomes the minnimum system requirement for goddamn DOOM.
Games are already horifically inefficient
That’s so far from the truth, it hurts me to read it. Games are one of the most optimised programs you can run on your computer. Just think about it, it’s a application rendering an entire imaginary world every dozen milliseconds. Compare it to anything else you run, like say slack or teams, which makes your CPU sweat just to notify you about a new message.
Many games, especially AAA games or ones relying on common game engines, are actually horribly inefficient. It’s hard to run any Unity/Unreal game in 4k on my 1070. Even if it has shit graphics like Lethal Company. What does run well? Smaller, custom engines, even Metro Exodus runs with 60+ FPS in 4k on my 1070, and still looks very good. Why? Because 4A Game is/was actually interested in creating a good engine and games. That’s the whole reason they split from the S.T.A.L.K.E.R team: Because, in their opinion, the engine was too inefficient.
Most games are just a quick cash grab tho, especially ones by large companies like EA. Other large companies with a significantly lower output of games, eg. Valve, do produce programmatically higher quality games tho.
It’s hard to run any Unity/Unreal game in 4k on my 1070
Both of these engines are capable of making very optimized games, it’s just that most of the developers using them either don’t have the expertise or don’t care to put in the effort.
I know. The inherent problem of games made with those engines is the lack of motivation, knowledge and experience of devs to make (programmatically) good games. Only very few games using those engines are good in that sense, and as exceptions confirm a rule I’d just simplify it to that statement.
Right buddy, seems like you’ve never had to play on a 3-gen old non-gaming laptop. That’s such a privileged view lmao.
Note that the image here isn’t from the AI project, it’s from actual Doom. Their own screenshots have weird glitches including a hit splat that looks like a butt in the image I’ve seen closest to this one.
And when they say they’ve “run the game” they do not mean that there was a playable version that was publicly compared to the original. Rather they released short video clips of alleged gameplay and had their evaluators try to identify if they were from the AI recreation or from actual Doom.
Even by the abysmal standards of generative AI projects this is a hell of a grift.
Even by the abysmal standards of generative AI projects this is a hell of a grift.
But if you invest now, you can make a game-generating AI a reality! /s
I’m pretty sure that screenshot is from the video. The zombieman has no feet
Possibly fair. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that exact screenshot used in other articles about Doom, but I’m not enough of a Doom nerd to be sure.
There’s a decent writeup over at Pivot-to-AI that looks at the paper as a whole in more detail.
An AI-generated recreation of the classic computer game Doom can be played normally despite having no computer code or graphics.
After this period, the model begins to run out of memory and the illusion falls apart.
Why are we lying about this? Just because it happens in the AI “black box” doesn’t mean it’s not producing some kind of code in the background to make this work. They even admit that it “runs out of memory.” Huh, last I checked, you’d need to be running code to use memory. The AI itself is made of code! No computer code or graphics, my ass.
The model, called GameNGen, was made by Dani Valevski at Google Research and his colleagues, who declined to speak to New Scientist.
Always a good look. /s
I mean, yes, technically you build and run AI models using code. The point is there is no code defining the game logic or graphical rendering. It’s all statistical predictions of what should happen next in a game of doom by a neural network. The entirety of the game itself is learned weights within the model. Nobody coded any part of the actual game. No code was generated to run the game. It’s entirely represented within the model.
What they’ve done is flattened and encoded every aspect of the doom game into the model which lets you play a very limited amount just by traversing the latent space.
In a tiny and linear game like Doom that’s feasible… And a horrendous use of resources.
It doesn’t even actually do that. It’s a glitchy mess.
And a horrendous use of resources.
This was a stable diffusion model trained on hundreds of thousands of images. This is actually a pretty small training set and a pretty lightweight model to train.
Custom / novel SD models are created and shared by hobbyists all the time. It’s something you can do with a Gaming PC, so it’s not any worse a resource waste than gaming.
I’m betting Google didn’t throw a lot of money at the “get it to play Doom” guys anyway.
Maybe they should have specified , the Doom Source Code
“No code” programming has been a thing for a while, long before the LLM boom. Of course all the “no code” platforms generate some kind of code based on rules provided by the user, not fundamentally different from an interpreter. This is consistent with that established terminology.
This would be like playing DnD where you see a painting and describe what you would do next as if you were the painting and they an artists painted the next scene for you.
The artists isn’t rolling dice, following the rule book, or any actual game elements they ate just painting based on the last painting and your description of the next.
Its incredibly nove approchl if not obviously a toy problem.
Thinking quickly, Generative AI constructs a playable version of Doom, using only some string, a squirrel, and a playable version of Doom.
It’s cool but it’s more or less just a party trick.
Is it though? We can show an AI thousands of hours of something and it can simulate it almost perfectly. All the game mechanics work! It even makes you collect keys and stock up on ammo. For a stable diffusion model that’s pretty profound emergent behavior.
I feel like you’re kidding yourself if you don’t think this has real world applications. This is the kind breakthrough we need for self-driving: the ability to simulate what would happen in real life given a precise current state and a set of fictional inputs.
Doom is a low-graphics game, so it’s definitely easier to simulate, but this method could make the next generation of niche “VidGen” models extremely accurate.
Can’t wait for your self-driving car to go out of memory mid ride.
I’m not convinced. The ammo seems to go up and down on a whim, as does the health
Because “AI” isn’t actually “artificial intelligence.” It’s the marketing term that seems to have been adapted by every corporation to describe “LLMs…” which are more like extra fancy power guzzling parrots.
Its why the best cases for them are mimicking things brainlessly, like voice cloning for celebrity impressions… but that doesn’t mean it can act or comprehend emotion, or know how many fingers a hand should have and why they constantly hallucinate contextless bullshit… because just like a parrot doesn’t actually know any meaning of what it is saying when it goes “POLLY WANT A CRACKER…” it just knows the tall thing will give it a treat if it makes this specific squawk with its beak.
Honestly I thinkyour self driving example is something this could be really cool for. If the generation can exceed real time (I.e. 20 secs of future image prediction can happen in under 20 secs) then you can preemptively react with the self driving model and cache the results.
If the compute costs can be managed maybe even run multiple models against each other to develop an array likely branch predictions (you know what I turned left)
Its even cooler that player input helps predict the next image.
Regardless of the technology, isn’t this essentially creating a facsimile of a game that already exists? So the tech isn’t really about creating a new game, it’s about replicating something that already exists in a fairly inefficient manner. That doesn’t really help you to create something new, like I’m not going to be able to come up with an idea for a new game, throw it at this AI, and get something playable out of it.
That and the fact it “can be played for up to 20 seconds” before “the model begins to run out of memory” seems like, I don’t know, a fairly major roadblock?
It’s just a research paper, not a product. It’s about discovering and learning new possible methods and applications.
That’s a fair point actually, I’m looking at it through a product lens, not a research one.
Yes, this does nothing for game dev. But I don’t think it was supposed to.
The fact that this is a genAI Model generating a reasonable, context aware image a whopping 20 times a second is nonetheless pretty impressive.
Unless you can monetize those 20 seconds like crazy
This sounds like the basis for a new Warioware game.
Perhaps you could be missing the trajectory of continuous improvement. How long until The Matrix?
“Playable” nah. “Interactive” yes.
That seems to be the case.
This is just a pile of garbage. Jim Sterling’s break down is the most complete argument. But this is just a plain ol bag of shit.
Link to the video. I agree, it was a really good video on this topic and how wrong it is philosophically.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t there have to be a code layer somewhere in there?
It’s like all those “no code” platforms that just obscure away the actual coding via a gui and blocks/elements/whataver.
In this case, no. This is just interpreting what the next frame should be by the previous one. Like how the sora videos work, but with input.
So then the code is to make the AI generate images and take input
Or the code is the operating system that the application is running on, or the code is the firmware that is operating the GPU that is crunching the numbers to make the neural net, or the code is the friends we made along the way.
I mean, yeah, there’s code, but none of it is Doom.
