What are AI ‘world models,’ and why do they matter?

techcrunch ^ | 12/14/2024 | kyle wiggers

[BenLurkin]

World models take inspiration from the mental models of the world that humans develop naturally. Our brains take the abstract representations from our senses and form them into more concrete understanding of the world around us, producing what we called “models” long before AI adopted the phrase. The predictions our brains make based on these models influence how we perceive the world.

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While the concept has been around for decades, world models have gained popularity recently in part because of their promising applications in the field of generative video.

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While a generative model trained on years of video might accurately predict that a basketball bounces, it doesn’t actually have any idea why — just like language models don’t really understand the concepts behind words and phrases. But a world model with even a basic grasp of why the basketball bounces like it does will be better at showing it do that thing.

To enable this kind of insight, world models are trained on a range of data, including photos, audio, videos, and text, with the intent of creating internal representations of how the world works, and the ability to reason about the consequences of actions.

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Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun says the models could...could help achieve a desired goal through reasoning.

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They could also spawn more capable robots.

Robots today are limited in what they can do because they don’t have an awareness of the world around them (or their own bodies). World models could give them that awareness, Mashrabov said — at least to a point.

“With an advanced world model, an AI could develop a personal understanding of whatever scenario it’s placed in,” he said, “and start to reason out possible solutions.”

[GOPJ]

“If a feather drops with the weight of an anvil or a bowling ball shoots up hundreds of feet into the air, it’s jarring and takes the viewer out of the moment. With a strong world model, instead of a creator defining how each object is expected to move — which is tedious, cumbersome, and a poor use of time — the model will understand this.”

AI generated pictures have some of the same issues - red flags going up in our sub conscience... The world view thing might make robots more effective in ten years but it could also change the consensus on what reality is... not as good an outcome.

[minnesota_bound]

#16 Nope, but there others with similar capabilities.

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