Hello, this is Alok Jha, host of Babbage, our weekly podcast on science and technology.
Welcome to Editor's Picks.
We've chosen an unmissable article from the latest edition of The Economist.
Please do have a listen.
Genie, an experimental artificial intelligence model released by Google in January,
is a jaw-dropping technical achievement.
Give the tool a prompt, an image, say, or a brief snippet of text,
and it will generate an interactive world for the user to explore.
Type in a straightforward request and the result is a realistic simulation.
Start with a painting by Georges Seurat by Kontrast,
and you can wander through a Sunday in the park in perfect Pointerist style.
Project Genie may feel like a video game, but its makers claim it is something much more profound.
They call it a world model.
an essential tool to help AI systems make sense of the complex,
unpredictable physical spaces into which many will eventually be put to work.
The company argues that a future where humanoid robots pop to the shops to pick up ingredients before cooking dinner or self-driving cars navigate country roads would not be possible without world models.
The concept dates back to a 1943 book by Kenneth Craik,
a Scottish psychologist who suggested that organisms carried a small-scale model of the world inside their head,
to test hypotheses on before carrying them out in reality.
Having some grasp of how the world works is a necessary step before making plans about how to change it.