The Race to AGI – Google DeepMind to Develop AI that Can Simulate Real Life

A minimalist depiction of a person facing a sleek mirror

Google is planning to develop artificial intelligence that will simulate real life, advancing developments in artificial general intelligence (AGI).

The new team working on the project will be assembled under Google’s AI research lab, DeepMind, and led by former head of OpenAI’s Sora team, Tim Brooks.

Brooks, who joined DeepMind in October last year to enhance Google’s video generation and simulator tools, announced in a post on X that the research lab has “ambitious plans to make massive generative models that simulate the world. I’m hiring for a new team with this mission”. 

The post was accompanied by two job listings for a research engineer and research scientist to work on the project, both role descriptions outlining the value of video and multimodal data training in being “on the critical path to artificial general intelligence”.


This new venture will build on the AI advancements already carried out by DeepMind, such as flagship tech Gemini – the brand’s image analysis and text generator tool, Veo – its video generation tool, and Genie – an image-to-video technology that can produce interactive 3D environments from real-world images or sketches.

The race to AGI

Artificial General Intelligence refers to a machine being able to understand or learn any intellectual task that any human can – but there’s been relatively no consensus amongst tech leaders on how close we are to achieving AGI.

Shane Legg, co-founder of DeepMind, once said there’s a chance AGI will be achieved by 2028, however other spectators have suggested it could take decades to achieve this technology.

On Sunday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman grabbed attention after posting on his personal blog that the tech firm, responsible for the advent of ChatGPT, may be on the brink of AGI creation. “We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it,” Altman wrote. “We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents ‘join the workforce’ and materially change the output of companies.”

Advertising in virtual worlds

We might not be there yet, but the advent of simulated realities will undoubtedly have an influence on the way marketers and advertisers engage with brand audiences.

Digital marketing expert and host of the Digital Marketing Institute (DMI)’s biweekly podcast, Will Francis, says that virtual 3D spaces will have an impact on experiential marketing and the retail industry. He says: “Any marketer will be able to plan a pop-up or in-store retail promotion, and potentially simulate how consumers might engage with that, looking for opportunities to optimise it.”

As someone who trains marketing professionals, Will highlights the possibility of this technology in upskilling marketers and creating test scenarios. “We’re already seeing digital twinning being helpful in marketing, where we use LLMs such as ChatGPT to create personas and interact with them in a virtual focus group. Being able to spin up 3D spaces that we can interact and experiment with takes this a step further.”

According to Ryan Nelsen, CMO at AI advertising company StackAdapt, these evolving technologies will “allow brands to deliver contextually relevant, multichannel strategies that not only capture attention but also drive meaningful action at scale.”

Nelson believes that the simulation of real-life environments can help marketers to align their messaging with surroundings consumers naturally engage with, however content oversaturation in these spaces might make it harder for brands to stand out.

“Consumer fatigue and scepticism towards AI-generated content are risks if authenticity is compromised,” explains Nelson. “Additionally, cost and accessibility may hinder smaller advertisers, and over-reliance on AI could stifle creativity, underscoring the need to retain human input for differentiation.”

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