Meta Ex-Scientist Ditches LLMs for Reality: AI World Models Ascend

KEY POINTS

•Yann LeCun plans to leave Meta in late 2025 to launch his world model startup focused on real-world physics.
•Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs introduced Marble, a commercial world model aiming to simulate reality with video data.
•Chinese company Tencent and UAE’s Mohamed bin Zayed University have also developed sophisticated world models.
•Building these models requires massive high-quality multimodal data, with datasets spanning images, videos, audio, and 3D scans.

In the newest plot twist of AI drama, Yann LeCun, the Meta AI whiz, is abandoning cozy big-language models (LLMs) faster than someone dodging free Bitcoin emails. By late 2025, he's launching a startup aiming at 'world models' that actually get physics, gravity, and why objects *stay* hidden instead of just spitting out text predictions. Meanwhile, Fei-Fei Li's World Labs dropped Marble—no, not a trickshot board game, but an AI that watches videos to actually "understand" real life. Tencent in China and the UAE's Mohamed bin Zayed University jumped on this world-model flex too, building smart simulations with billion-pair datasets, human annotations, and probably more patience than your last Zoom meeting. It’s a high-stakes race to make robots and games that don't act like drunk toddlers smashing Legos.