Google just opened the doors to Project Genie, its experimental AI tool that turns text prompts and photos into explorable game worlds. Starting Thursday, Google AI Ultra subscribers in the U.S. get early access to the prototype, which fuses Google DeepMind's latest Genie 3 world model with image generator Nano Banana Pro and Gemini. The move signals Google's aggressive push into the world model race as competitors like World Labs and Runway accelerate their own launches.
Google DeepMind is betting that the future of AI isn't just about generating images or video - it's about creating entire worlds you can step into and explore. Project Genie, now available to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the U.S., represents the company's first major consumer play in the emerging world model wars.
The experimental prototype combines three of Google's AI technologies: the Genie 3 world model unveiled last August, the Nano Banana Pro image generator, and Gemini. Together, they transform simple text descriptions or uploaded photos into interactive 3D environments that users can navigate in first or third person. Want to explore a marshmallow castle floating in the clouds? Done. A claymation wonderland with chocolate rivers? Project Genie will generate it in seconds.
"I think it's exciting to be in a place where we can have more people access it and give us feedback," Shlomi Fruchter, research director at DeepMind, told TechCrunch in an interview, barely containing his enthusiasm about the launch.
The timing isn't accidental. Five months after Genie 3's research preview, Google is racing to gather user feedback and training data while competitors circle. Fei-Fei Li's World Labs dropped its first commercial product, Marble, late last year. AI video startup Runway launched its own world model in December. And former Meta chief scientist Yann LeCun's new venture AMI Labs is building world models from the ground up.
World models - AI systems that create internal representations of environments and predict future states - have become the industry's latest obsession. Many researchers, including DeepMind's leadership, view them as critical stepping stones toward artificial general intelligence. But the near-term business case is clearer: video games, entertainment experiences, and eventually training robots in simulation before they touch the real world.
