Starting Thursday, Google AI Ultra subscribers in the U.S. can play around with the experimental research prototype, which is powered by a combination of Google’s latest world model Genie 3, its image-generation model Nano Banana Pro, and Gemini. Many AI leaders, including those at DeepMind, believe world models are a crucial step to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI). DeepMind’s release of Project Genie comes as the world model race is beginning to heat up. Runway, the AI video-generation startup, has also launched a world model recently. And former Meta chief scientist Yann LeCun’s startup AMI Labs will also focus on developing world models.