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Comment by whalee | Hacker News Reader

This was a common argument against LLMs, that the space of possible next tokens is so vast that eventually a long enough sequence will necessarily decay into nonsense, or at least that compounding error will have the same effect.

Problem is, that's not what we've observed to happen as these models get better. In reality there is some metaphysical coarse-grained substrate of physics/semantics/whatever[1] which these models can apparently construct for themselves in pursuit of ~whatever~ goal they're after.

The initially stated position, and your position: "trying to hallucinate an entire world is a dead-end", is a sort of maximally-pessimistic 'the universe is maximally-irreducible' claim.

The truth is much much more complicated.

[1] https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2512.03750

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And going back a little further, it was thought that backpropagation would be impractical, and trying to train neural networks was a dead end. Then people tried it and it worked just fine.

> Problem is, that's not what we've observed to happen as these models get better

Eh? Context rot is extremely well known. The longer you let the context grow, the worse LLMs perform. Many coding agents will pre-emptively compact the context or force you to start a new session altogether because of this. For Genie to create a consistent world, it needs to maintain context of everything, forever. No matter how good it gets, there will always be a limit. This is not a problem if you use a game engine and code it up instead.

The models, not the context. When it comes to weights, "quantity has a quality all its own" doesn't even begin to describe what happens.

Once you hit a billion or so parameters, rocks suddenly start to think.

We're talking about context here though. The first couple seconds of Genie are great, but over time it degrades. It will always degrade, because it's hallucinating a world and needs to keep track of too many things.

That has traditionally been the problem with these types of models, but Genie is supposed to maintain coherence up to 60 seconds.

I've tried using it a couple of times, but can't get in. It is either down or hopelessly underprovisioned by Google. Do you have any links to videos showing that the quality degrades after only a few seconds?

Edit: no, it just doesn't work in Firefox. It works incredibly well, at least in Chrome, and it does not lose coherence to any great extent. The controls are terrible, though.

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