Imagine you’re taking the dog for a walk when a brilliant idea for a video game strikes you. You rush home, grab your laptop, fire up some software, and type out a few sentences describing the world of your game. You click a button, and boom, the video game world appears on your computer screen. This isn’t speculative fiction, as Google’s Genie 3 is a step in this direction.
In August 2025, Google’s AI research firm, DeepMind, introduced Genie 3. It is a world-building model capable of generating fully dynamic, three-dimensional environments in real time from text and image prompts. Call it an instant video game that tops out at 720p resolution at 24 frames per second, and can maintain these specs for a few minutes at a time.
The last few years have seen exponential developments in large language models (LLMs) like Google’s Gemini models and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. This has allowed developers to perfect the kind of agent-based AI systems that serve as building blocks for tools like Genie 3. That said, OpenAI currently doesn’t have any products in its arsenal that could complete with Genie 3’s world-building capabilities.
Genie 3 goes beyond the usual text and video generation
In a way, DeepMind’s developers are going back to where it all began, at least as far as AI training tools are concerned. On an episode of the “Google AI: Release Notes” podcast, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis mentioned, “The advent of the thinking models is a little bit of a harking back to our original gaming work on things like AlphaGo and AlphaZero,” referring to the company’s two earlier agent-focused modules. In the former, an AI player was able to thwart a world champion of a board game called Go, while the latter saw an AI player becoming an instant master at chess, shogi, and Go without human influence.
While LLMs have come a long way, platforms like ChatGPT are relatively primitive when it comes to generating visuals; never mind entire AI worlds that AI players are able to thrive within. Not long ago, OpenAI released Sora, a text-to-video model that creates short video clips from text, image, or video prompts. It’s a solid AI tool, but the end result is a static video that a user may only watch. Platforms like Genie 3 (and Genie 2 to a lesser extent) create interactive environments that both human and AI players can navigate. You’ll be privy to natural phenomena like water, lighting effects, and various environmental reactions, all of which may be used to train AI agents. Developments in world-building models could be a way toward AGI (artificial general intelligence); a world where AI tools are able to act, predict, and reason as humans do.
Genie 3 and the future of the gaming industry
“Instant world-building” is the kind of buzz phrase video game developers may become familiar with faster than anyone anticipated. While the gaming industry evolves at a pretty rapid rate, human output is limited by factors like gaming engines, render times, hardware power, and the time it takes to brainstorm creative ideas.
But with tools like Genie 3 at the developers’ disposal, the time it takes to build a game from the ground up could be significantly reduced. We’re talking months and years to days and hours. With in-game assets like landscapes, towns, vehicles, and other three-dimensional elements being just a quick text prompt away from fruition, developers can spend more time on things like story and characters.
We could also be dealing with far more intelligent NPCs (non-player characters) down the line. Imagine AI-programmed companions and enemies reacting to the gaming environment and player actions less predictably than ever before. At this stage of the game, it’s hard to tell exactly how simulation generators like Google’s Genie 3 will impact the world. Still, it was only a matter of time before we arrived at the present: a world of infinite AI possibilities and a fast-moving timeline that sees yesterday’s innovations covered in dust today.
