THE FIVE CATEGORIES OF WORLD MODELS

Summary from the TLDR AI newsletter

AMI Labs and World Labs both raised over $1B on "world models," but the term covers five distinct approaches: JEPA, spatial intelligence, learned simulation, physical AI infrastructure, and active inference. The sharpest result in the piece is V-JEPA 2, achieving zero-shot robot planning after training on just 62 hours of domain-specific data. Each approach solves a different subproblem, and the lines between them are expected to blur fast.