Google DeepMind is assembling a new team of artificial intelligence researchers to develop “world models” that can simulate physical environments. The initiative will be led by Tim Brooks, a former co-lead for OpenAI’s Sora project who joined DeepMind in October to work on Google’s video generation and world simulators.

Google is establishing a team to build AI that can simulate the physical world, led by one of the former co-leads on OpenAI's Sora model.

Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun described world models this way during a speech at Hudson Forum earlier this year: “A world model is your mental model of how the world behaves…You can imagine a sequence of actions you might take, and your world model will allow you to predict what the effect of the sequence of action will be on the world.”