Google DeepMind is forming a new artificial intelligence research team focused on developing "world models" that can simulate physical environments. The initiative, led by Tim Brooks, a former co-lead for OpenAI's Sora project, aims to create AI models capable of simulating real-world scenarios, with potential applications in video games, movies, and robot training.

The concept of world models is a relatively new development in AI, with the potential to revolutionize various industries. By creating real-time interactive media environments for video games and movies, world models can enable more immersive experiences for users. Moreover, they can provide realistic training scenarios for robots and other AI systems, allowing them to learn and adapt in a more human-like manner.

The development of world models is also a crucial step towards achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), a long-sought benchmark in the tech industry. Google's focus on AGI is not surprising, given the intense competition in the field. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently claimed that his company has cracked the code to achieving AGI, and autonomous AI agents may start to join workforces this year.

DeepMind's new team will work alongside existing Google AI projects, including its flagship Gemini AI models, Veo video generator, and Genie – Google's prior world model for simulating playable 3D environments in real-time. The team is currently hiring research engineers and scientists to help advance AI "world models" capable of simulating real-world scenarios by solving problems around training "at massive scale," curating training data, and studying how they can be integrated with multimodal language models.

The job descriptions highlight the significance of scaling pretraining on video and multimodal data in achieving AGI. According to DeepMind, "world models will power numerous domains, such as visual reasoning and simulation, planning for embodied agents, and real-time interactive entertainment."

While Google DeepMind is making significant strides in the field, it's not the only player in the game. Nvidia's Cosmos platform is already advancing physical AI, autonomous vehicle, and robot development, and the World Labs startup, founded by "the godmother of AI," Fei-Fei Li, is also working on similar technology. The race to achieve AGI is heating up, and it will be interesting to see how these competitors fare in the coming years.

In conclusion, Google DeepMind's new 'world modeling' AI team marks a significant development in the pursuit of AGI. As the tech industry continues to push the boundaries of AI capabilities, it's clear that the next few years will be crucial in shaping the future of artificial intelligence and its applications in various industries.