When a Turing Prize winner raises over a billion dollars to create a new model for the future of AI, people should be paying attention. Yann LeCun and his company AMI Labs are planning to build “world models” instead of large language models. These are models that are designed to learn from reality instead of predictive text. More importantly, he believes that in six months, every AI company will be talking about world modeling. It’s cause for excitement and concern, as tech writer Shelly Palmer shares in his newsletter:
“I love this journey, but the tech also terrifies me. I keep asking myself what scares me more: a future where AI fundamentally misunderstands how the world works, or a future where it actually understands the world completely. Both scenarios have kept me awake recently.”
There are a lot of questions right now around what exactly world modeling is, how it can be trained and how it might be corrupted. For now, it’s a space to watch and a term to bookmark.