AI tools are being prepared for the physical world

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.PROJECT GENIE, an experimental artificial-intelligence model released by Google in January, is a jaw-dropping technical achievement. Give the tool a prompt—an image, say, or a brief snippet of text—and it will generate an interactive world for the user to explore.

Type in a straightforward request, and the result is a realistic simulation. Start with a painting by Georges Seurat, by contrast, and you can wander through a Sunday in the park in perfect pointillist style.Project Genie may feel like a video game, but its makers claim it is something much more profound.

They call it a “world model”, an essential tool to help AI systems make sense of the complex, unpredictable physical spaces into which many will eventually be put to work. The company argues that a future where humanoid robots pop to the shops to pick up ingredients before cooking dinner, or self-driving cars navigate country roads, would not be possible without world models.The concept dates back to a 1943 book by Kenneth Craik, a Scottish psychologist who suggested that organisms carried a “small-scale model” of the world inside their head, to test hypotheses on before carrying them out in reality.

Having some grasp of how the world works is a necessary step before making plans about how to change it. Without one, any living thing would be forced into a purely reactive life—flinching from pain, reaching for food, and little more.Giving that same ability to AI systems was a promising area of research as far back as the 1990s, before large language models (LLMs) sucked away the world’s attention.

Now that attention is back.There are three main approaches being explored to build world models. One natural starting-point is AI