Computers Have Started Imagining the World
Language models learned by reading text; world models try to learn by watching the world. Meta's V-JEPA pulls physics out of video, DeepMind's Genie turns a single image into a world you can walk around in, and World Labs and NVIDIA Cosmos are chasing the same goal for 3D spaces and robots. The promise is big: Robots and self-driving cars could run their experiments in their heads instead of on the street. But these models still can't stay consistent for long, and the question of whether they truly understand anything or are just very good predictors is still wide open.