World Models: Computing the Uncomputable

The definitional move matters more than the technology survey: action-conditioned prediction, P(st+1 | st, at), is presented as the line separating world models from video slop. If that definition holds, the $4B+ deployed into World Labs, AMI, GI, and Decart is a bet that spatial-temporal reasoning trained on games and driving footage transfers to general embodied control. The strongest signal is Ai2's MolmoBot result: a sim-only-trained policy outperforming VLAs trained on thousands of hours of real data. If sim-to-real transfer keeps improving, the entire robotics data flywheel thesis inverts: synthetic environments become the bottleneck worth owning, not real-world demonstrations.