This week, I moderated a panel on world models at the All In conference (no relation to the podcast), and it gave me a chance to dig into one of the most mysterious corners of the AI world. The big players in the space are Yann LeCun’s AMI Labs and Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs — and while both have accumulated a lot of buzz and funding, they also rank pretty low on the trying-to-make-money scale. At their core, world models are about automating spatial intelligence, so the field could head in lots of exciting and lucrative directions, from robotics to interactive video to more complex self-driving systems.
But when I started to press on where we would actually see the tech commercialized, things got foggy. The closest thing I found to an authority was Michael Rabbatt, a co-founder of AMI Labs and the company’s VP of World Models, who joined me on the panel. But when I pressed him on exactly what the company was working on, he was cagey.
But this sort of caginess extends to the whole world-modeling space. World Labs’ Marble is probably the most fully developed product in the space, and its demos range from straightforward media creation, building explorable environments for video games, or CGI effects. There are robotics use cases too, but the whole platform seems more designed to demonstrate capabilities.
That secrecy even extends to these companies’ suppliers. On the sidelines of the same conference, I spoke to Alex de Vigan, CEO of Physicl — a data supplier for the burgeoning world model business. He says he knows Physicl’s data has been useful for whatever they’re building, but he’s still in the dark about what exactly that is.
We could build more useful data if we knew what they were working on,” de Vigan told me. Part of the mystery comes from how versatile world models are as an idea. The simplest version is a navigable map of the world, similar to the AI models that power self-driving cars.
But the same modeling approach that helps a Waymo weave through traffic could also help a humanoid robot carry boxes, or turn a few minutes of video footage into an explorable environment. AMI has already dipped its toe in manufacturing, biomedicine, robotics, and even AI software for doctors through its Nabia partnership. Surely it won’t pursue all of those — but maybe one or two of them are standing out?
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