Omni and the Marble That Rolls Uphill

My Weird Prompts · Sep 28, 2026 · 26m

Google DeepMind's Gemini Omni landing page claims the model has "an intuitive understanding of forces like gravity, kinetic energy, and fluid dynamics." But video models have been walking people through walls for years — and a landmark ICML 2025 paper found they generalize by case-based retrieval, not physical law. So how did Omni seem to close the gap without the radical architectural departure the world models camp, including Yann LeCun, insisted was necessary? This episode unpacks the claim, the failure history, the counter-argument, and what Omni actually did differently. Episode 5625 —…