World model companies are keeping a lot of secrets

Everyone in the world-models space is sitting on a pile of cash and a ton of buzz, but good luck getting anyone — from the founders to their own data suppliers — to tell you what they're actually building. 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.