Project Genie Makes 3D “World Models” On-Demand - DTNS 5196

0:03This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, January 30, 2026. We tell you what you need to know, give you the important context and help each other understand. Today, Google is making it super easy for anyone to create their own subpar recreations of classic video games. Oh, I can't wait to do that myself. I'm Jason Howell. I'm Jen Cutter. Let's start with what you need to know with the big story. This is a fun big story and I'm super curious. I'm so happy that I'm doing this with you right now, Jen, because you have your kind of your foot into the gaming world and this crosses into that realm in very interesting ways.

0:42Google is rolling out Project Genie. It's a Genie 3 powered world model sandbox. You got to be a Google AI ultra subscriber in the US. I am so I'm going to play around with this. It lets users generate simple interactive 3D worlds from text or image prompts. So you could use either way to kick it off to create these short 60 second sessions that users can play inside of Genie 3. And it's, you know, 720p resolution, 24 frames per second. If you create a world and a character or a rolly ball, which we'll talk about, whatever it is, you can use the WAS and D keys for movement. So that'll move you through the world.

1:30And Google is framing this as a research test bed for discovering new use cases. World models is a real big topic in AI right now. And so this is one way to explore that. So imagine using the model to, I don't know, visualize a film scene. If you're working on production and you want to kind of get a sense of what that might look like or kind of walk through it or to build interactive educational snippets or even robotics training within simulated environments. Google says this was all trained using publicly available data on the web. And to kind of illustrate what it's capable of, Google has released a number of demo worlds, which users can choose to play.

2:13Or if you want to remix those worlds or other creations with your own characters, your own spins on how it's all put together, you can do that. But users can also, of course, create their own from scratch. Like I said earlier, you use your voice prompt or an image and you can start off. But Google has a number which I plan to kind of play around with to see. One pre-made world is called Rollerball. It's a blue orb that rolls around this like snowy environment world. And it leaves a paint trail kind of in its wake. Less of a game, more of kind of like a proof of concept. You're not going to get any sound in this one.

2:51Apparently, The Verge reports that the controls were a little finicky and laggy. Another one called Backyard Racetrack, which from the video that I saw on The Verge article looks pretty cool. It places a Hot Wheels-style car on a miniature roadway in a backyard, as you can imagine. Verge says, you know, there are imperfections in rendering and control, but definitely a good demonstration of what Project Genie is capable of. And being someone who is kind of tapped into the gaming world right now, and we are so used to humans creating our gaming experiences, how do you feel about a system like Project Genie creating dynamically these AI-generated, I don't know, gaming environments?

3:39Well, I will say for everyone curious about this, do check out the Verge article because they have the videos embedded in it where if you've ever wanted to see a very barren, I don't know, two FPS version of Breath of the Wild, that is the place to go. But both the Verge and the rest of us watching these demos were shocked at how readily it was able to reproduce all of Nintendo's flagship things like, oh, did you want to walk around again a very barren area of Mario Galaxy? You could do that. It generated it immediately. Obviously, it's very buggy. There were like two links present at one point.

4:24You could jump, you could open your glider, which I have to say, I was surprised. I did not think that this thing had the depth to recreate that kind of level of complexity that usually you only see from like hardcore modders who like know those systems inside out this created it using their internal tech but uh so the next step i guess is nintendo having some chats with google have to imagine and i mean it's it's super interesting right because this you know you take what the verge showed off which is okay here's mario a new a new generation of mario playing playing inside that world here's link you know here's zelda that all that stuff all of this very well-known ip in gaming and yet google's saying we train this using publicly available data on the web so then i guess it comes down to okay what do you define as publicly available you know youtube is owned by google is that publicly available and if so then And maybe there are videos that are gameplay footage of Zelda and Mario.

5:30And I don't know. We see this a lot with the other AI generation services, which is, you know, they're doing their best to put in the guardrails to keep people from creating IP that they don't have the rights or the licenses for. But yet it happens time and time again. And here it's obviously happening again. And I have to imagine, like you said, that Nintendo and Google are going to have some conversations around this. Yeah. My guess was also like, oh, publicly available means the 800 billion hours of everybody doing everything on YouTube. And part of me was really curious. It's like, OK, like those are very modern games, very modern style, a little bit painterly, which the model was able to recreate.

6:16But I always wondered, like, I have to go looking for it because I haven't seen it yet. If somebody said, like, I want you to make me Crash Bandicoot PS1, would it be able to lock it down the same camera angles that Crash Bandicoot has? Would it be able to have the very pointy polygons of that era? Or would it try to make it modern? Because like, there are cool uses of this tech. I don't want to just be negative about it. Because like the rollerball thing, really cute, really clever. There are ways to go from that. And if people use these things as a springboard for like, oh, okay, like this prototype has promise, I will then go and make it myself.

6:52I'm all for it. Yeah, yeah. It seems to be a growing theme and something that I think all these things are pointing more and more towards in my mind, which is there will be a time, and I feel like maybe I've stepped on this soapbox on this show before, so apologies if I have, but there will be a time somewhere in the future where when you want to play a game, when you want to watch a movie, you can already do this with music. when you want to listen to a song, you don't necessarily need to find the thing that's already created. Like if I want to watch a zombie movie that's set in the 1400s in some random but very specific place, there will probably, I'm guessing, be a time in the future where you can just kind of go online and say, this is the movie I want to watch right now.

7:39And it does it and you watch it. Whether it's good or not, that's a later problem, not a now problem. And I think what we're seeing here is the beginnings or not even the beginnings because we've been seeing this kind of bubbling up over the last couple of years but we're seeing a further stepping towards what does it look like to go into a model and say this is the game i want to exist this is the game that i want to play right now you know it's kind of like the vibe the vibe coding story that we talked about um a couple of weeks ago on the show i think it was me and win where the things that are being created through vibe coding aren't always necessarily meant to have a long you know never-ending life they're just meant to serve an immediate need and maybe that's what something like this is i just want to play this game right now and i don't care that it only lasts for 60 seconds i just want to see what it would be like and maybe that sparks some sort of creation idea for you know for another aspect of uh what you do yeah well i know that next week i'm gonna go to my friends with the uh with the correct subscription tier and be like, hey, hey, so what happens when you try to make Splatoon this week?

8:46Did they fix it? Yeah, right. And can you get it to create Splatoon by saying create Splatoon or do you have to go around? Because that's a lot of times, you know, they have the protections if you use the actual words. Like if you go in there and say create a Zelda game, I'm guessing you're going to get some error message that says, no, we can't actually do that. But if you create a game, it's like, oh, you know, you describe around it, you know, without actually saying the word. Well, that's the thing with Rollerball. I was thinking like, OK, what if you go in and say, I want Rollerball, but versus.

9:19And I want them to be squid like creatures. Yeah, that'd be neat. Yeah, you can remix. So I would imagine that's possible. Yeah. DTNS is made possible by you, the listener. Thanks to Ken Hayes, Philip Shade and Paul Boyer. Thank you. You're wonderful. You know you're wonderful, but I'm here to tell you you are.

9:42All right, there's more we need to know today. Let's get to the briefs. Apple posted a strong holiday quarter with 23 % year-over-year growth and a lot of demand for its iPhone 17 and record services revenue. Tim Cook said the current lineup is the company's most popular series of iPhones to date. Apple showed it can expand on its base in mature markets like China by winning back share with higher-end iPhone 17 Pro models and aggressive trade-in offers. Apple is also growing user engagement with its services through record usage of the App Store, iCloud, and Apple TV+. The iPhone continues to be the anchor for its services and media ecosystem, even as management signals upcoming pressure from memory and chip constraints that could weigh down its near-term supply.

10:29Wearables and accessories were a relative weak spot with softer Apple Watch and AirPod upgrade activity that left the category relatively flat. Mac and iPad also lagged behind the performance of the iPhone, which created a bit of a drag on hardware growth. Cook commented on the selection of Google Gemini as the technology driving its upcoming Siri revamp, saying that it would be the most capable model to work alongside its Apple Foundation models. Yeah, Cook wasn't really sharing much about the Gemini relationship other than to say, look, we tested a lot and this is the way we chose. And I don't have a whole lot more to report on that at this time, but it'll be interesting.

11:13One thing that I saw people kind of batting around that I think is definitely an interesting thing that I hadn't considered is the potential impact of a revitalized Siri in this way on the company's capacity to handle it. And Cook did say that it's kind of difficult to estimate exactly what the demand is going to actually be once Apple does what it's doing with Siri. But of course, they're saying, hey, we're Apple. We can prepare for that capacity. We can add to it if we need to once it's out. But I hadn't really considered the fact that, yeah, that's going to be a really big deal once you have all the iPhones very suddenly, you know, tapping into this new revitalized Siri with Gemini in the back end.

11:58I'd be very curious to see kind of how that plays out. Yeah. I wonder if this is going to be the last big year for a little bit for hardware, including the iPhones, because we're all broke. not everybody has another 2k and again i'm going on canadian prices uh to just drop on a phone i bought a phone last year and this sucker better last me the next five to ten years because i am not buying another one i mean and you've got your your uh your update guarantees you know not just iphone not just apple also you know definitely on the android side which is where i spend much of my time, they're promising longevity and promising longer term update cycles, largely because Apple has kind of created that kind of commitment, you know, earlier than anybody else.

12:49So these devices more and more are being built and backed in a way that you can hold on to them longer. But, you know, Apple doesn't want that, right? They want you buying every single year. Another thing to point out is that Tom did mention that the services is, you know, as tied to the iPhone as they are, and that continues to be a good thing. They grew slower than expected. Not necessarily good news in the long run. I mean, you know, but the one thing was true from this earnings report is that their iPhone 17 strategy is working. The hardware is very in demand, and they're seeing a lot of growth as far as that's concerned, at least.

13:27So good stuff for Apple there. All right, let's talk about rabbit. This is the company behind the handheld AI gadget from like a couple of years ago, designed by teenage engineering, kind of an orangey squarish looking thing. I have it on a on a shelf somewhere. It looked cool, but it kind of failed to deliver on its promises at launch. Well, rabbit is now teasing a new AI product called Project Cyberdeck. And it's a clamshell, keyboard-driven device, leans on, they say, native AI agents along with tools like CloudCode. And it's specific to VibeCoding, command line workflows, that sort of stuff.

14:12The device has, according to Rabbit, a, quote, really great screen, that's what they said, and a 40 % hot-swappable keyboard. And so that basically means users can pull out the mechanical switches on the keys, place their own in its place without the need for things like soldering or any special tools. I've never been a big keyboard person that does this sort of thing. Maybe you are, Jen. But I know that people who are, that's the sort of thing that gets them excited. It's like, oh, wow, they're really paying attention to that, too. That's awesome. Users will have control over which models they choose to run on the device.

14:47However, Rabbit isn't revealing any real concrete hardware specs beyond what I've just told you, nor are they showing a working physical prototype at this time. All they really showed in this tweet was a little kind of promotional image that kind of hints at, you know, the clamshell opening. You can see the keyboard inside. The teaser image doesn't show any touchpad. So it's uncertain if it's going to be driven by voice or maybe it works with a separate peripheral like Bluetooth mouse, that sort of thing. and further confusing the tease was mention of the company, quote, exploring a portable cyberdeck, which, I mean, looking at the teaser image, that's what this appears to be already.

15:27So who knows how far they've actually taken this idea behind closed doors? It just kind of sounds like Rabbit, you know, isn't giving up on trying to figure out what an AI gadget is. Does this, I don't know, what do you think? Does this deserve to exist? well uh when i saw the story my first thought was wait that company still exists i thought the rabbits sunk them yeah no the r1 did not sink them they've been they've actually been um working reasonably hard on bringing the the updates that they promised to the r1 to the r1 and last year they made a number of updates i don't know that it really undoes a lot other than making people who already own it very happy you know because they finally get some of those capabilities.

16:12But yeah, they've had to undo kind of a really shaky start. Like the teaser images, it's pretty. It is very pretty. But you're right. Like from the scale, I was confused. But I'm always, it always feels a little suspect when it's like, oh, yeah, no, it's great. Trust us. Just look at this image. Don't worry about like the physical size and specs. Now, like the steam machine still doesn't have a price. So like a lot of things are in flux with the current supply chain constraints. But from a company like that, I want to see physical prototypes in the hands of smart people before I start even considering this as a product that exists.

16:50Yeah, I mean, it sounds like they just kind of want to get people's imaginations going. One thing that I find really interesting about this, though, so this is a dedicated vibe coding, in air quotes, device with a keyboard, you know, and many are pointing out, rightfully so, that we can already do this via chatbots You know, we can already do this with the phone in our pocket and the laptop or the computer that we're using, which to my mind puts Rabbit in the same position that it found itself with the R1, which is how do you convince people to use a dedicated piece of hardware for something that they already have relatively easy access to with the things they already use and carry?

17:28It's like repeating again, but, you know, everybody's got to try and scramble and find what is an AI hardware. What is dedicated AI hardware? Someone's going to crack the code, I think. But I don't know that this is necessarily it, but we'll see. Love it or hate it, Windows 11 crossed a significant milestone with 1 billion users now reported, according to CEO Satya Nadella. Windows 11 even managed to reach the 1 billion user milestone 160 days quicker than it did with Windows 10, despite the stricter hardware requirements. This is, of course, in light of a stream of Windows 11's problems that power users have been reporting on 11 since launch.

18:12Pavan Davaluri, president of Windows and Devices, told The Verge that the company will be swarming engineers over the next few months to fix Windows 11's performance and reliability issues and to modernize more legacy UI. Are you a Windows user? I'm still on 10 and I have been testing various flavors of Linux. I have old hardware. I literally have nothing in my house that can even run 11, so it was never a consideration for me oh interesting well ars technica also reports that roughly 1 billion active windows 10 pcs are still in use so you're part of that half of those users like you can't upgrade because of windows 11's hardware limits requirements so you know that's that's looking at like a 50 50 split of users between 10 and 11 right now at least according to Ars Technica.

19:08So you're not alone is what I'm saying, Jen. Like there's a way to work around it. I have a machine where I could use a workaround and get through, but it's a little janky. And, you know, Windows keeps trying to plug those holes to let people like me run 11. So I was like, okay, fine. You know, I'll be as a customer. I could take a hint.

19:28Want honest reviews from people who actually bought and live with tech? Then you need Live With It. Sarah Lane hosts a weekly look at the tech she and others have spent months living with because they needed it. Patrick Norton talks about headphones. Roger has experience with Wyze cameras. And was the accidental purchase of an iPhone Pro Max too big for Eileen's hands? Find out by listening to Live With It wherever you like to get your podcasts. Or you can watch at YouTube.com slash Daily Tech News Show.

20:02All right, we got some quick headlines that are good to know, might make you look really smart in the future. Bloomberg News reports perplexity struck a three-year,$750 million deal to make Microsoft's Azure Foundry its primary cloud platform, including access to models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and XAI. Thanks to Motang in the subreddit for calling out news that K-pop Demon Hunters was officially the most streamed movie of 2025 clocking in at around 20.5 billion viewing minutes in the us alone that comes out to around 207 million views if you're talking about the full movie based on those numbers anyways open ai announced it will phase out gpt 4.0 gpt 4.1 gpt 4.1 mini and gpt4 mini next month so it can focus on its newer systems yeah they had to do it eventually it's coming whether you like it or not musk is reportedly exploring mergers that would bundle spacex xai starlink x and grok into a single trillion dollar entity ahead of an expected ipo Darren Aronofsky, filmmaker and founder of the Primordial Soup AI Film Studio, announced on this day 1776, an animated series that will tell the story of America's founding while using human voices for the characters and founding fathers.

21:33Curious to see that one. And lots of like film news today, it seems like. Go ninja, go ninja, go. What was it? Go ninja, go ninja, go. I think that's what it was. You know what that means. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, along with esteemed and not at all 90s punchline Vanilla Ice, are returning to the big screen for a one week theatrical run of TMNT 2, The Secret of the Ooze, as a celebration of its 35th anniversary and a 4K restoration. So there you go, fans. I have to find out if that is playing anywhere near me. That would get me into a theater. Would it? Well, so I like as a 90s kid, I did get to, you know, I was part of Turtles Mania.

22:16Donatello was the best fight me. But when I was allowed to see TMNT 2, I remember being terrified. I was terrified of that movie as a kid because like the bad guys, like the other mutants in it were like, oh, my God, just so freaky. Jim Henson's workshop did amazing job with all that. And that's the only Turtles movie I've never rewatched. so to see it fresh in theaters would kind of be an experience you could get over your tmt trauma i think i think i'm old enough now that i can handle it yeah are you sure you're old enough now to handle vanilla ice cameos because that's part of that movie i think i think i'm inoculated on uh on anything that is previously considered cringe because sometimes you just like some good earnest fun that's true that's true that's that's a really good point uh we end every episode of DTNS with some shared perspectives.

23:07Today, Bodhi Grimm from the Kilowatt Podcast has a clarification on the Tesla Fremont plant conversion. Hello, quick thoughts on the Model S and X story from today's DTNS. In all of 2025, Tesla delivered less than 51 ,000 Model S, X, and Cybertrucks. So it makes business sense to stop production of the S and X because very few people are buying them. I don't know what the split between the S, X and Cybertruck is exactly, but we can safely assume none of the vehicles qualify as a success. Also, Tesla isn't converting the entire Fremont factory for Optimus production, just the space where the S and X lines are in the factory.

23:51I'd imagine if they're building less than 51 ,000 model S, X and C, T built in Texas. The space being taken up in the Fremont factory is quite small, maybe one line for each car, so two production lines total. Fremont also builds Model 3 and Model Y, which takes up the majority of the space. I have more thoughts, but I know today is a busy day for you. Brody. Never too busy for you, though, Brody. So thank you for riding in. Yeah, when I drive around, now granted, we do own a Model Y, but man, I see them everywhere. And I do not see many of the Model Xs. A neighbor in the neighborhood, probably like five or six years ago, loaned his X to us at one point.

24:38And that was when we drove it then. And it has the Falcon Wing doors, right? And the doors we hated, but the driving in it we loved. And that was why we ended up buying a Model Y however many years ago. So, but yeah, the door thing on the X, I don't know if that's the reason that people aren't buying it. It's probably not. It's probably a very small reason, but that was definitely the reason that we chose not to buy it. So, there you go. Yeah, well, in Southern Ontario, I see a lot of like the older model Teslas, not too many of the new. But I do see a couple of Cybertrucks around, which is always really funny, especially with all of the snow and salt and sand on the roads.

25:18And those cars are looking pretty rough right now. Oh, yeah. Oh, I hadn't thought about that. So I have to figure like Cybertruck is going to be like more of a regional thing for, you know, people who maybe do not have to deal with the amount of salt that you do in Southern Ontario. Oh, boy. I wonder if, yeah, I wonder if they thought about that in advance. They probably didn't. Well, they probably did. Of course they did. But still. What are you thinking about? Do you have some insight, feedback or corrections on a story? We want to hear it, so please share it with us at feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com.

25:53Yes, thanks again to Bodie Grimm for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You can keep us in business by becoming a patron at patreon.com slash DTNS. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people. Host, producer, writer, Tom Merritt. Host, writer, Jason Howell. Co-host, Sarah Lane. Co-host, Rob Dunwood. Co-host, Jen Cutter. Co-host, Wintwood Dow. Producer, Anthony Lemos. Producer, Roger Chang. Editor, Hammond Chamberlain. Editor, Victor Bognat. Contributing producers, Kevin Tech, Noel Cow, and Brandon Richards. Science correspondent, Dr.

26:32Nikki Ackermans. Social media producer and moderator, Zoe Detterding. Our mods, Beatmaster, WSkottis1, BioCow, Captain Kipper, Steve Guadarama, Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stevens, a.k.a. Gadget Virtuoso, and J.D. Galloway. Mod and video hosting by Dan Christensen. Music provided by Martin Bell and Dan Luters. Art by Len Peralta. Acast ad support from Tatiana Matias. Patreon support from Bobby Wagner. And our guest this week, Andy Beach. And thanks to all our patrons who make this show possible.

27:14The DTNS family of podcasts, helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.