TECHNOLOGY

Can AI World Simulators Really Help Robots Make Better Choices?

Wed Oct 22 2025

Generative World Models and Smarter Decisions

In the realm of artificial intelligence, there's a lot of buzz about generative world models (WMs). These models can create simulations that look incredibly real. But can they actually help robots and other AI agents make smarter decisions?

The Current Focus

Most tests for these models focus on how good the visuals are. But that's not the whole picture. What really matters is whether these models can help AI agents succeed in real-world tasks.

Introducing World-in-World

To find out, a new platform called World-in-World was created. It's the first of its kind to test WMs in a closed-loop world. This means the AI agents can interact with the environment just like they would in real life.

  • Standard Way for Decision Making: World-in-World provides a standard way for different WMs to make decisions.
  • Four Different Environments: It has four different environments to test how well these models perform.
  • Main Goal: The main goal is to see if the models can help AI agents complete tasks successfully, not just create pretty pictures.

Key Findings

The study found some surprising things:

  1. Visuals vs. Task Performance: Having great visuals doesn't always mean the AI will do well in tasks. Being able to control actions is more important.
  2. Data After Training: Adding more action and observation data after training helps more than improving the video generators used to create the simulations.
  3. Computing Power: Giving the models more computing power during decision-making can greatly improve their performance.

Challenging Common Beliefs

These findings challenge some common beliefs about how world models should be developed and used. They show that there's more to creating useful AI than just making realistic simulations.

questions

    If world models were a band, would they be known for their visual albums or their ability to rock the stage with embodied performances?
    If world models were people, would they be better at playing video games or just really good at drawing pictures of them?
    What are the practical implications of allocating more inference-time compute for world models in embodied settings?

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