Google is forming a new team to build AI that can simulate the physical world
Tim Brooks — one of the co-leads on OpenAI’s video generator, Sora, who left for Google’s AI research lab, Google DeepMind, in October — will lead the new team, he announced in a post on X. It’ll be a part of Google DeepMind.
“DeepMind has ambitious plans to make massive generative models that simulate the world,” Brooks wrote Monday morning. “I’m hiring for a new team with this mission.”
According to job listings Brooks linked to in his post, the new modeling team will collaborate with and build on work from Google’s Gemini, Veo, and Genie teams to tackle “critical new problems” and scale models “to the highest levels of compute.” Gemini is Google’s flagship series of AI models for tasks like analyzing images and generating text, while Veo is Google’s own video generation model.
As for Genie, it’s Google’s take on a world model — AI that can simulate games and 3D environments in real time. Google’s latest Genie model, previewed in December, can generate a massive variety of playable 3D worlds.
