ClaimsDemis Hassabis

“But again, if you look at something like Veo, our video generation model, it can model liquids quite well, surprisingly well.”

Demis Hassabis, interviewee 23 July 2025 Transcript for Demis Hassabis: Future of AI, Simulating Reality, Physics and Video Games (#475) (Lex Fridman)

Factual AI capabilities

Veo, Google DeepMind's video generation model, can model liquids surprisingly well.

Mostly true True in substance, wrong in a detail.

Factual: Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?

The second judge would not resolve this claim; the verdict shown is the first judge's.

What would count as true or false

Judge against evidence available as of July 2025 on how Veo (Veo 2 or Veo 3) renders liquids. True: official demos, independent reviews or physics-plausibility benchmarks show that Veo generally produces realistic liquid behaviour (pouring, splashing, flow), and that this is notable for a video model. Mostly true: liquids are generally rendered well, with some documented failures. Mixed: the evidence is split between realistic results and frequent clear physical errors in liquids. Mostly false: independent evaluations show Veo often fails at liquid physics, with good results limited to curated demos. False: evaluations show Veo models liquids poorly.

Set before the research began.

Evidence (4)

  1. E1 Google Veo 2 is one of the best AI video models I've ever seen — here's 5 examples of what it can do Tom's Guide · 17 December 2024

    “Weirdly, pouring liquid is something other models struggle with but Veo 2 did it perfectly.”
  2. E2 raw AI Wiki (aiwiki.ai) · 22 October 2026

    “It wrote that Veo 2 seemed "to have a strong grasp of refraction and tricky liquids, like maple syrup," but that it "can't quite clear the uncanny valley."”
  3. E3 Veo Physics Collapse Reference — Fluid Gravity Newtonian Failure AI Video Auditor (AVA) · 1 May 2026

    “Water visibly flows upward at 0:02 in the central column of the falls”
  4. E4 VideoPhy: Evaluating Physical Commonsense for Video Generation UCLA (Kai-Wei Chang bibliography page), ICLR 2025 paper by Bansal et al. · 1 January 2025

    “Specifically, the best performing model, CogVideoX-5B, generates videos that adhere to the caption and physical laws for 39.6% of the instances.”

Reasoning

A Tom's Guide reviewer said Veo 2 handled pouring liquid "perfectly" where other models struggle (E1). Another reported review said Veo 2 had "a strong grasp of refraction and tricky liquids, like maple syrup," while still showing uncanny-valley effects (E2). The only documented liquid failure is a 2026 page describing water flowing upward in a Veo clip (E3), and the quoted VideoPhy result does not name Veo (E4). Overall the evidence supports generally good, notable liquid rendering, with some reported failures.

Cite this claim

Demis Hassabis, “Veo, Google DeepMind's video generation model, can model liquids surprisingly well.” (said 23 July 2025). Verdict: mostly true. Reliability API, claim c_8cbfdd9395d9, method 0.1.0+c876030c, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_8cbfdd9395d9

This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.

Reply to this claim

For Demis Hassabis, or someone speaking for them: a correction or counter-evidence. Replies are read before anything is shown; an approved reply shows your name, role, date, statement and link. Your email address is never shown and is deleted 30 days after the decision (privacy).

More factual claims by Demis Hassabis

  1. Mostly true Factual 20 May 2026
    “Performs better than 3.1 Pro on coding & agentic tasks”

    Gemini 3.5 Flash performs better than Gemini 3.1 Pro on coding and agentic tasks.

  2. Mostly true Factual 19 May 2026
    “It can take photos, video & audio and build entirely new scenes.”

    Gemini Omni can take photos, video and audio and build entirely new scenes.

  3. Mostly true Factual 10 April 2026
    “I didn’t feel like that was proper AI because that system, let’s take Deep Blue, okay, it’s world champion level at chess, at chess, but it can’t do anything else.”

    Deep Blue was world-champion level at chess but could not do anything else.

  4. Resolved true Factual 10 April 2026
    “And it uses AI to actually digitally watermark any generated image.”

    SynthID uses AI to digitally watermark any generated image, and Google generative technologies such as Veo carry this watermarking.

  5. Mostly true Factual 3 August 2025
    “They still can't really yet go beyond asking a new novel question or a new novel conjecture or coming up with a new hypothesis that has not been thought of before.”

    Current AI systems still can't really yet go beyond asking novel questions or conjectures, or come up with new hypotheses not thought of before.

All of them

Verdicts are made automatically; how verdicts are made.