Issue #98 RL Edwin Dong
World Models, Simply Explained
Free editionPRO edition
This week’s PRO issue includes a Colab notebook that breaks down the implementations of the core components of the original 2018 world model paper. We analyze the vision, memory, and connector components, then visualize the “imagination” that emerges from the mathematical model.
As always, the code in this issue can be executed on a normal home PC and does not require a large amount of VRAM.
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Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a centerpiece in modern AI. Not only are they extremely useful, scalable, and applicable in many industries, but they have also become the most used form of AI for the general public.
While LLMs demonstrate amazing pattern recognition and next-token prediction, they lack a grounded understanding of the physical world, making them unstable when deployed in new environments (e.g., autonomous driving, robotics).
In the pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), researchers have shifted towards a new type of model to simulate the physical laws and relationships of reality.
World models are a new type of large-scale model that can understand the real world. At its core, a "world model" gives an artificial intelligence a form of imagination.
They are foundation models, meaning that they fall in the category of extremely large models trained on massive datasets.
They can be adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks like text generation, image recognition, etc. Think LLMs like ChatGPT, DeepSeek, or Claude.
Instead of an AI just reacting blindly to what it sees right now, a world model allows the agent to internally simulate, or "dream" about, the future before it makes a decision.
For instance, if an autonomous car is deciding whether to brake or swerve, its world model predicts how the pedestrians, other cars, and physics will react to both choices, allowing it to pick the safest option.
World models can take in text, image, video, and movement to generate videos and navigate realistic physical environments.
This edition is for PRO members.
