I built marshmallow castles in Google’s new AI-world generator Rebecca Bellan 9:29 AM PST · January 29, 2026 Google DeepMind is opening up access to Project Genie, its AI tool for creating interactive game worlds from text prompts or images.
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.
Coming five months after Genie 3’s research preview, the move is part of a broader push to gather user feedback and training data as DeepMind races to develop more capable world models.
World models are AI systems that generate an internal representation of an environment, and can be used to predict future outcomes and plan actions. Many AI leaders, including those at DeepMind, believe world models are a crucial step to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI). But in the nearer term, labs like DeepMind envision a go-to-market plan that starts with video games and other forms of entertainment and branches out into training embodied agents (aka robots) in simulation.
DeepMind’s release of Project Genie comes as the world model race is beginning to heat up. Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs late last year released its first commercial product called Marble . 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.
“I think it’s exciting to be in a place where we can have more people access it and give us feedback,” Shlomi Fruchter, a research director at DeepMind, told TechCrunch via video interview, smiling ear-to-ear in clear excitement over Project Genie’s release.
DeepMind researchers that TechCrunch spoke to were upfront about the tool’s experimental nature. It can be inconsistent, sometimes impressively generating playable worlds, other times producing baffling results that miss the mark. Here’s how it works.
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You can also use real-life photos as a baseline for the model to build a world on, which, again, was hit or miss. (More on that later.)
Once you’re satisfied with the image, it takes a few seconds for Project Genie to create an explorable world. You can also remix existing worlds into new interpretations by building on top of their prompts, or explore curated worlds in the gallery or via the randomizer tool for inspiration. You can then download videos of the world you just explored.
DeepMind is only granting 60 seconds of world generation and navigation at the moment, in part due to the budget and compute constraints. Because Genie 3 is an auto-regressive model , it takes a lot of dedicated compute — which puts a tight ceiling on how much DeepMind is able to provide to users.
“The reason we limit it to 60 seconds is because we wanted to bring it to more users,” Fruchter said. “Basically when you’re using it, there’s a chip somewhere that’s only yours and it’s being dedicated to your session.”
He added that extending it beyond 60 seconds would diminish the incremental value of the testing.
“The environments are interesting, but at some point, because of their level of interaction the dynamism of the environment is somewhat limited. Still, we see that as a limitation we hope to improve on.”
When I used the model, the safety guardrails were already up and running. I couldn’t generate anything resembling nudity, nor could I generate worlds that even remotely sniffed of Disney or other copyrighted material. (In December, Disney hit Google with a cease-and-desist , accusing the firm’s AI models of copyright infringement by training on Disney’s characters and IP and generating unauthorized content, among other things.) I couldn’t even get Genie to generate worlds of mermaids exploring underwater fantasy lands or ice queens in their wintery castles.
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