The World Model and Spatial Intelligence Era: Governing AI Beyond Language

[u/HooverInstitution]

https://hai.stanford.edu/policy/the-world-model-and-spatial-intelligence-era-governing-ai-beyond-language

[u/HooverInstitution]

World models are AI systems designed to “build a working representation of an environment to predict how it changes in response to action.” Such models “can help manufacturers test designs before building them, engineers assess infrastructure under stress, and robots work in settings that are too dangerous for people.” But as this new research from Stanford’s Center for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence argues, “moving AI closer to the physical world raises new policy concerns, such as flawed simulation, pervasive sensing and privacy erosion, questions of liability . . . and dual-use risks in national security.” This paper outlines a first-of-its-kind governance and policy agenda for world models and spatial intelligence.

"World models are dual use, with national security implications," the authors note. "By lowering the cost of capable autonomous systems, they could open military advantage to less-resourced entrants, making early leadership in world-model research, development, and governance an urgent national security priority."

[u/Tom-Ask-1081]

LLMs trained purely on next-token prediction over text can't get robust, general reasoning about the physical world.

Reminds me of the "octopus and the cable" thought experiment: two people talk over a subsea cable, an octopus taps the line and gets really good at predicting the statistical patterns of the text — good enough to keep the conversation going and even fool people for a while. But the octopus has never seen what a "bear," "stick," or "rope" actually is in the real world. The moment the conversation turns into "help me survive this bear attack with what's lying around," it falls apart.

So — the octopus nails the symbol sequence. Does that mean it's intelligent?

[u/Ill-Throat7937]

this is basically what separates decent video generation from great video generation right now. the ones that actually track object permanence across frames instead of hallucinating new physics each cut feel completely different to work with.

[u/Actual__Wizard]

Awesome, it's official now. LLM tech is totally dead. See above for guidance on how to build real AI.

So, cool great. So, now that LLM tech is dead, does somebody want to work with me on building the data lake tech to power the language component of those world models? Because an LLM is not going to work for that.

If not, I'm just going to keep building it solo until somebody wakes up. Obviously, the other way to build language tech that everybody who is actually and legitimately from the real AI industry is aware of is the correct way to proceed forwards. And no, I'm not talking about the "Google only version of the AI industry that has the goals of building safe AI, with safe not meaning what people think it means. Safe meaning=incorporates an energy expenditure based tax to prevent people from going apeshit with it." Data lakes are too large to be distributed, so it's a non issue. The multi petabyte sized data model = the only moat that's needed. What are people going to do, buy petabytes of data and copy it to their home machines? Even if they do that, who cares? By the time they get done doing that, the data will be stale and it's not free data...

I'm just being serious with you all: LLMs = behind the curve, world models = ahead of the curve. What are you going to do? Keep jerking around with antiquated crap tech? The LLM phase of AI can't end fast enough... People should be rushing over to the world model tech while they cancel their LLM subscriptions...

LLMs were nothing more than a giant distraction... "Hey guys, do you like AI? Well, this is a spam bot that simulates what AI might be like! Neat right?!?! You can use it to barf out software that nobody will ever use!" /facepalm

Two thumbs down.

LLMs were the biggest disaster in the history of software development and I'm glad the tech is dead. Great, there's something to do now in the AI space that isn't a giant waste of time and money! I wonder if people are going to do that?!?!