Why Robots Need World Models to Navigate the Messy Real World

The Announcement

Two developments this week, one from a Chinese startup and one from MIT, crystallized a shift that's been building in AI for months: the race to give robots a physical brain. X Square Robot, a Chinese embodied-AI company, laid out what IEEE Spectrum called "an unusually explicit bet" on an integrated software stack combining a world model for predicting physical changes with an action model that generates robot behavior. Separately, MIT's Computer Science and Artificial...