Induction Labs Photon-1 Simulates Desktops, Plays Checkers, and Models Billiard Physics From One Pretraining Run

Most agents that learn from video need to know what action produced each frame. Induction Labs is arguing that this requirement is the bottleneck. Last week, they released imagination models, a foundation model architecture that pretrains on raw video with no action labels at all. Their test system is Photon-1, a sparse 106B-A5B mixture-of-experts (MoE) transformer trained on 18 years of computer demonstration video. On an internal computer use benchmark, Induction Labs reports that Photon-1 beats Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite while using far less pretraining compute and costing roughly 3× less to serve. What an imagination model actually does An imagination model predicts future frames autoregressively using a next-latent-token-prediction objective. It does not generate pixels during pretraining. Everything is modeled in a learned representation space. The claim that matters is this: predicting future states teaches the model to complete tasks, even though it never sees an action during pretraining. Induction Labs calls this an implicit policy. The model learns concepts of what a person is doing, rather than a label for each mouse click. The compression trick that makes it scale The architecture depends on a vision encoder that uses finite scalar quantization (FSQ). Each frame is compressed into 960 discrete tokens. Each token is an 8-dimensional vector. Each dimension takes one of five values: −1, −1/2, 0, 1/2, 1. That gives a codebook of 5⁸ possible codes. The resulting encoding is about 2.2 KB per frame. Induction Labs reports over 100× better compression than existing OCR and multimodal-model representations, while preserving text, layout and state changes. To hit that rate, Photon-1 uses a differential latent encoder. It encodes video frames as pairs, so the latents describe differences between frames rather than frame contents. (function(){ window.addEventListener('message',function(e){ if(!e.data||e.data.mtpFrame!=='mtp-photon-explainer')return; var f=document.getElementById('mtp-photon-explainer-frame'); if(f&&e.data.height)f.style.height=e.data.height+'px'; }); })(); Data and pretraining compute The corpus starts from an internal index of 2 billion publicly available videos. Filtering reduces that to roughly 2 million computer screen recordings. An internal keyframe detection model strips redundant frames. The final dataset is 575 million frames, sampled at 1 frame per second. That equals 552 billion tokens, or about 18 years of video. Photon-1 was pretrained from scratch for a single epoch. Training the 106B-A5B MoE at 32K context took approximately 30,000 H200 GPU-hours, or 4.4×10²² training FLOPs. The research team implemented training in PyTorch with custom fused kernels for the vision encoder and MoE layers, sustaining 40% end-to-end MFU. Those three figures are mutually consistent: 30,000 H200-hours at 40% MFU lands almost exactly on 4.3×10²². From imagination to action Induction Labs finetuned Photon-1 on fewer than 35,000 computer use trajectories to teach the action and instruction format. Special computer use tokens let the model emit actions. At inference, Photon-1 predicts the next frame’s state first, then outputs the action that gets there. Online reinforcement learning follows. Rollouts run in real time on virtual machines at scale, and outcomes are verified programmatically to produce reward. The Linux VMs run five desktop environments (LXQt, Xfce, MATE, GNOME and Plasma), each with a Google account for login-restricted web apps and an internal ChatGPT clone with no rate limits. The compute and cost comparison ModelPretraining computeWeighted inference cost / 1M tokens*Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite1.200 × 10²⁴ FLOPs$0.36Photon-10.044 × 10²⁴ FLOPs$0.11 *Weighted at a 10:1 input-to-output token ratio, which Induction Labs says matches its computer use tests. Two caveats belong next to that table. First, the Gemini figure is Ind