Top developers are shifting from chatbots to physical AI. Here’s why

At the heart of world model research is the idea that AI can’t be truly intelligent if it can only read a book. It also needs to read the room. Computer scientist Louis Castricato was in his eighth year studying large language models — the artificial intelligence technology behind chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude — when he started to feel like he was hitting a dead end.“We basically have passed the point of doing real fundamental LLM research,” Castricato said. “Now it’s just applications.”The researcher quit his doctoral studies at Brown University and started a new company, called Overworld. Its ambition is in its name: AI that can understand and navigate a world, not just words.There’s still plenty of money to be made from AI chatbots — investors are counting on it as they commit trillions of dollars to leading developers like Anthropic and OpenAI. But a growing number of AI entrepreneurs are dedicating themselves to what they see as the next frontier: “world models” that teach AI systems, and sometimes robots, how to react in a physical environment.They include some of the field’s most prominent scientists, such as “Godmother of AI” Fei-Fei Li, who describes the concept of a world model as “one of the most important and most overloaded terms in AI today.”