{"id":630847,"date":"2026-09-20T22:10:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-20T22:10:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/630847\/"},"modified":"2026-09-20T22:10:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-20T22:10:09","slug":"world-model-companies-are-keeping-a-lot-of-secrets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/630847\/","title":{"rendered":"World model companies are keeping a lot of secrets"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s AMI Labs and Fei-Fei Li\u2019s World Labs \u2014 and while both have accumulated a lot of buzz and funding, they also rank pretty low on the trying-to-make-money scale<\/a>.<\/p>\n

At their core, world models are about automating spatial intelligence<\/a>, so the field could head in lots of exciting and lucrative directions, from robotics to interactive video to more complex self-driving systems.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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. \u201cWe\u2019ll talk about it when we\u2019re ready to talk about it.\u201d Over email, he clarified, \u201cWe\u2019re still in a research and building phase, so we\u2019re not talking publicly about any product plans or timeline.\u201d<\/p>\n

To be fair, AMI is less than a year old, so it\u2019s fair enough to keep quiet. But this sort of caginess extends to the whole world-modeling space. World Labs\u2019 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That secrecy even extends to these companies\u2019 suppliers. On the sidelines of the same conference, I spoke to Alex de Vigan, CEO of Physicl \u2014 a data supplier for the burgeoning world model business. He says he knows Physicl\u2019s data has been useful for whatever they\u2019re building, but he\u2019s still in the dark about what exactly that is. \u201cI wish they would tell us more. We could build more useful data if we knew what they were working on,\u201d de Vigan told me.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t pursue all of those \u2014 but maybe one or two of them are standing out?<\/p>\n

No one doubts that there are lots of viable businesses to be built on world model tech \u2014 and as long as it\u2019s easy to fundraise, there\u2019s no particular pressure to focus on one. In fact, there\u2019s good reason not to. If AMI announced tomorrow that they had built a humanoid OpenClaw or a next-generation Hollywood rendering system, a lot of other labs would suddenly be very interested in the space. Soon, the lab would face potential competition from the other world model companies, the neolabs, and even OpenAI and Anthropic.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In some ways, it\u2019s the flip side of all that easy fundraising. Your competitors can fundraise, too \u2014 and the same money that lets you build under the radar is also funding lots of potential rivals once the path to market becomes clear. But even if that competition is inevitable, it\u2019s best if you delay it for as long as possible, which means keeping quiet about exactly what you\u2019re building.<\/p>\n

Cixin Liu fans will recognize this as a dark forest scenario<\/a>: If you don\u2019t know who else is in the woods, it\u2019s best not to attract attention.<\/p>\n

This post was first published on September 18, 2026.<\/p>\n

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This week, I moderated a panel on world models at the All In conference (no relation to the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":630848,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[61,60,80,65780],"class_list":["post-630847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology","tag-world-models"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/630847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=630847"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/630847\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/630848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=630847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=630847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=630847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}