From TechCrunch, September 20:
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 Rabbat, 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. “We’ll talk about it when we’re ready to talk about it.” Over email, he clarified, “We’re still in a research and building phase, so we’re not talking publicly about any product plans or timeline.”
To be fair, AMI is less than a year old, so it’s fair enough to keep quiet. 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. “I wish they would tell us more. We could build more useful data if we knew what they were working on,” de Vigan told me....
....MUCH MORE
If interested see also:
December 2024 - "Fei-Fei Li’s Startup Allows You to Walk in the 3D World of Edward Hopper Paintings"
November 2026 - "He’s Been Right About AI for 40 Years. Now He Thinks Everyone Is Wrong."
January 2026 - Former Meta AI Honcho Called Large Language Models A Dead End
August 14 - "World Models Are AI’s Next Frontier"
One of the overarching themes in the arc of AI development: Large Language Models and especially chatbots are not the be-all and end-all of artificial intelligence.
The writer, Celine Herweijer, is Visiting Professor in Energy and Geopolitics at the LSE and former Group Chief Sustainability Officer at HSBC....
August 15, 2026 - More On Physical AI: "How world models became AI's next frontier"
