Just because they happen to be throwing in the option to sign up to to play with the Genie 4 into an Ultra plan, doesn't mean that this is a material part of the value prop for Gemini.

Presumably, they can learn something from how niche Ultra users interested in tech demos engage with it. If that's an upside, it's really unclear it why it would make sense for "a reveal" to promise something too expensive to deliver to such Ultra users. (None of which means that the suggestion that you are responding to is technically reasonable or possible--just that it is unclear that one should dismiss the idea because one views this through the lens of a consumer "product reveal"

Just because OpenAI had to crawl back from Sora to focus resources, and Anthropic proudly proclaims in their filing that they have been avoiding promising creative opportunities for the same reason, doesn't mean that Google can't continue to do lab/research stuff.

It would be odd if they didn't.

Or render a low fidelity 3d model for coherence and then raytrace that onto a 2d frame that is then rendered at higher fidelity.

Your understanding is broadly correct. There is a 3D world, and the GPU computes how it looks like from a particular viewpoint.

In essence, objects are painted back to front, so that in the final image every pixel shows the nearest visible object. The details get complicated, but the idea is simple.

The model already ingests text, so you just to attach a tiny VLM head that reviews the image and read / writes scene continuity text tokens.

Once you have that you can probably just RL with scoring on continuity issues and eventually the VLM head will learn to update dense continuity tokens?

So many fun wierd experiments to run if you have some compute to mess with. There are competent open video diffusion models that you could test this concept easily enough.