What happens when Waymo runs into a tornado? Or an elephant?
An autonomous vehicle drives down a lonely stretch of highway. Suddenly, a massive tornado appears in the distance. What does the driverless vehicle do next?
This is just one of the scenarios that Waymo can simulate in the "hyper realistic" virtual world that it has just created with help from Google's DeepMind. Waymo's World Model is built using Genie 3, Google's new AI world model that can generate virtual interactive spaces with text or images as prompts. But Genie 3 isn't just for creating bad knockoffs of Nintendo games; it can also build photorealistic and interactive 3D environments "adapted for the rigors of the driving domain," Way …