The latest ambition of artificial intelligence research — particularly within the labs seeking “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI — is something called a world model: a representation of the environment that an AI carries around inside itself like a computational snow globe. The AI system can use this simplified representation to evaluate predictions and decisions before applying them to its real-world tasks. The deep learning luminaries Yann LeCun (of Meta), Demis Hassabis (of Google DeepMind) and Yoshua Bengio (of Mila, the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute) all believe world models are essential for building AI systems that are truly smart, scientific and safe….