Ben Poole

knock knock #veo3

Today, we're open sourcing the code behind "The Infinite Crate," our VST/AU plugin that lets you play with Lyria RealTime directly inside your favorite DAW! 🎧🎶 Since we released The Infinite Crate last year, it’s been used by some of our favorite artists - including a wonderful showcase with @daitomanabe in Tokyo - and being featured as a top new music tool at NAMM 2026. We’re now fully open sourcing the plugin for developers to fork, modify, and make their own under the permissive Apache 2.0 license. 💾 Get it here: github.com/magenta/the-in…

@robrombach @venturetwins sick

New paper out! We present a training method for multimodal generative models, called Self-Flow, which combines classic flow matching and representation learning. Why? Unlike most representation alignment methods, our new approach does not require external, pretrained models and thus scales gracefully to joint multimodal training on images, videos and audio. How? It combines per-timestep flow matching with dual-timestep representation learning, improving the models' internal representations. This approach outperforms prior methods and shows promising scaling behavior in multimodal pretraining. It also enables downstream applications such as action prediction for embodied AI. webpage+paper: bfl.ai/research/self-… code: github.com/black-forest-l… Credit to @hila_chefer, @pess_r, Dominik, @dustin_podell, Vikash, @Vinh_Suhi and Antonio. If you enjoy doing open research like this, come and join BFL! We are actively hiring🌲

1/6 Introducing Unified Latents: what if your diffusion model's latents were measured in bits? Instead of relying on dimensionality reduction, we learn a latent AE with explicit bitrate control. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2602.17270 @emiel_hoogeboom, @TimSalimans

neuroAI comparisons of ANNs to brains do have a range of problems. Even more than I had realized. And I was worried before: biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

World models for the real world! Awesome work with incredible colleagues at Waymo 🤖🚙

We’re excited to introduce the Waymo World Model—a frontier generative mode for large-scale, hyper-realistic autonomous driving simulation built on @GoogleDeepMind’s Genie 3. By simulating the “impossible”, we proactively prepare the Waymo Driver for some of the most rare and complex scenarios—from tornadoes to planes landing on freeways—long before it encounters them in the real world. waymo.com/blog/2026/02/t…

The Genie is out of the bottle 🧞‍♂️ Try it now: labs.google/ProjectGenie

🚨NEW LABS EXPERIMENT🚨 Introducing Project Genie, an experimental prototype that lets you create and explore infinitely diverse worlds! Prompt with images or text to create a living, expanding world that builds itself in real-time around you. Access is rolling out today to Google AI Ultra subscribers (US only, 18+) Learn more: labs.google/projectgenie

Introducing Project Genie: An experimental research prototype powered by Genie 3, our world model, that lets you prompt an interactive world into existence — and then step inside 🌎

I got early access to Project Genie from @GoogleDeepMind ✨ It's unlike any realtime world model I've tried - you generate a scene from text or a photo, and then design the character who gets to explore it. I tested dozens of prompts. Here are the standout features 👇

🧞‍♂️🧞‍♂️🧞‍♂️

This is absolutely shameful. Agents of a federal agency unnecessarily escalating, and then executing a defenseless citizen whose offense appears to be using his cell phone camera. Every person regardless of political affiliation should be denouncing this.

I'm proud to have had @JeffDean as my lead at Google for the last 10 years. He is one of the few people of his stature in our industry always willing to stand up and say the obvious. We can't let this administration scare us away from acknowledging the reality we are living in. It's time to stand up and use our voices to end this.

While generative AI continues to impress, it takes a dedicated group of incredible artists, storytellers, and researchers to create a compelling film. Check out the awesome work from Connie and team on Dear Upstairs Neighbors:

Vision-language models are getting better every day. Can we use them to improve image compression? Yes! For my internship, working w/ @GoogleDeepMind, @GoogleResearch, we designed VLIC, a diffusion autoencoder post-trained with VLM preferences. Our preprint is out today! A🧵:

We’re hiring student researchers at Google DeepMind for 2026. Come work with our great team in SF on anything from diffusion / world models / 3D. Send me an email if you’re interested!

@brandondamos @reflection_ai Exciting, congrats Reflection and looking forward to more awesome open models!

An update: I have left Meta Superintelligence Labs and joined @reflection_ai in NYC!! Today is my first day. I started in the Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) lab at Meta, then Facebook, over six (!) years ago as my first job out of the PhD. They were some formative years. The group is full of exceptionally talented people that have profoundly shaped my perspective on life and research. I am grateful for everything we have shared and proud of everything we created together. I have decided it's time to try to build a startup and new frontier models with Reflection. Superintelligence will be one of the most significant advancements of our lifetimes, resulting in a computational reflection of ourselves. We believe it should be safe, open, and accessible to all. I am excited to be jumping into the post-training and reinforcement learning pipelines to advance capabilities and alignment. And we are hiring! Please get in touch.

Introducing the new fastest and most flexible view synthesis method: Radiance Meshes. RMs are volumetric triangle meshes that can be thrown into any game engine, rendered at ~200 FPS@1440p on a RTX4090, and edited using conventional tools. Here's a demo running on my desktop:

@gstsdn ML at train time, AGI at test time

If we had AGI it would not be so important to carefully shuffle and deduplicate our training data. A human, when presented with the same sequence repeated over and over, would just shrug and ignore it after a bit. This feels like a really important unaddressed gap.

🚨Google and UCSD just introduced Radiance Meshes, a new radiance field representation that produces watertight meshes and renders faster than 3DGS. Code and demos are available now. Code: github.com/half-potato/ra… Demos: #demos" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">half-potato.gitlab.io/rm/#demos