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- Hacker News
- What’s the long term utility of world models?
There’s no doubt they’re technically impressive, but what does one do with it?
by joenot443 - Right now there is (AFAIK) no world model product booking any meaningful revenue. So there's a decent chance WMs turn out to have no long-term utility at all.
However, there are a few promising markets, assuming WMs continue to get better and cheaper:
1. Robotics training / evaluation: modern end-to-end (sensors-to-control) robot policies require simulators that are almost indistinguishable from reality. If your sim is distinguishable from reality, the evaluation metrics you get from sim don't mean anything and the policies you train in sim don't work. World models will likely be the highest-fidelity robotics simulators, since WMs are data-driven and get arbitrarily more-realistic given more data/compute. This is why so many robotics companies have WM projects [1] [2] [3] [4].
2. Video frontends for agents: in the same way that today's frontier labs are building realtime voice interfaces [5] which behave like a phone call, realtime video interfaces will behave like a video call. Early forms of this don't feel compelling IMO [6] [7], but once the models can instantly blend between rendering the agent itself, drawing diagrams/visualizations, rendering video, etc. I can see it surpassing pure voice mode.
3. Entertainment: zero-shot world generation (i.e. holodeck, genie 3; paste in an image/video/text prompt and get a world) will be a fun toy but I'm not convinced it has any long-term value. I'm more optimistic about proper narrative experiences where each scene/level is a small, carefully-crafted world (behaving like a normal film scene if you don't touch the controls, and an uncharted/TLoU-style narrative game if you do), such that the sequence of scenes builds up a larger story.
[1] https://wayve.ai/thinking/gaia-3/
[2] https://xcancel.com/Tesla/status/1982255564974641628 / https://xcancel.com/ProfKuang/status/1996642397204394179
[3] https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-f...
[4] https://www.1x.tech/discover/world-model-self-learning
[5] https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/interaction-models/
[6] https://runwayml.com/news/introducing-runway-characters
[7] https://blog.character.ai/character-ais-real-time-video-brea...
by ollin - Digital twin?by bix6
- It's a step towards something else?by whynotmaybe
- I believe the idea is to offer simulation of ideas to test out new tasks AND something like dreaming.by iinnPP
- They can be base models for a bunch of things. Turning text-conditioned video generation models into robotics VLAs is a fun exercise.
This one is probably too small to be useful for that, and not diverse enough? But I could be wrong.
by ACCount37 - Put them in a robot so that it can navigate the physical world like humans. Self-driving cars.by esafak
- The world model is useful for planning. It can "anticipate" consequences of actions. This can be used for a kind of tree search to decide on optimal actions in roboticsby fancyfredbot
- World models will be how general purpose robots finally work. They are essentially learned simulators of the world. They will replace traditional robotics simulators which are not flexible enough to enable training of general robotics policies. Robot control policies will be trained and evaluated in learned simulators, and the policies themselves will also be world models in order to predict the consequences of their own actions and thus enable planning. Simulated data will scale much better than expensive real-world robot data, and will allow robot policies to reach LLM-level dataset sizes, and subsequently, LLM-level performance.
It is inevitable that learned simulators will replace hand-coded simulators, as it is a straightforward application of the Bitter Lesson: http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html
By enabling general purpose robotics, world models will be one of the most useful inventions of all time. For examples of what I'm talking about in current research, check:
Dreamer 4: https://danijar.com/project/dreamer4/
DreamDojo: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.06949
Tesla's world model: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFh9GAzHg1c
Waymo's world model: https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-f...
by modeless - First video with the guy walking the mountain in snow has consistency issues with the cave entrance. Which is "expected" at this model size?!by pferdone
- Remember the first Will Smith spaghetti?by echelon
- All of the videos have rather glaring consistency issues when direction shifts back to areas previously shown.
- Most videos seem to have some issues like that, e.g. the book on the table in the library video takes up different shapes every now and then.
The 'Refiner' effect seems to do the opposite if the examples are representative as in all cases the 1-st stage images look better than the 'refined' ones. Less clutter, more realistic, less 'cowbell' for those who know the phrase.
by Leonard_of_Q - My dreams have it too, which is unexpected at that model size!by andai
- Outputting video of that quality/consistency at 1 minute, for a 2.6B model seems insane?by Incipient
- It's a very specific use case. This model can generate 1 minute videos of what is essentially a streaming game scene.by basilgohar
- It's because it is insane/misleading. It's a two stage process, scroll to the key features:
> A dedicated 17B long-video refiner sharpens texture, motion, and late-window quality on top of the long-rollout backbone.
by tredre3 - silly question: what's "world" about what's being generated here? is the an actual abstract representation of physical space (like, eg, a game-engine style scene graph?) or does it just mean "this video generator is more coherent physically than other video generators"by alloyed
- World in this context means that these videos are interactive, just like a video game. In the linked examples you can see the keyboard and mouse inputs. The model is trained to maintain about a minute of scene consistency so you can look around and objects out of view will reappear when you look back in that direction.by futureshock
- A world-model is one that predicts the next state of a simulated world given the current state and optionally some action from an agent inhabiting the world. It is quite analogous to a language-model that predicts the next word.
That world-state can be anything, but in the last year or two, the term has taken a narrower meaning: a video generation model that reacts naturally to game-like controls, as if it was simulating a videogame. But there's no additional state behind the video frames.
by oersted - All video models are terrible at consistency. Even closed source ones.
Seedance 2.0, Kling 3 are regarded the best closed source video models we have. I have subscribed to a few AI video subreddits, consensus atm is they are good for anything but long form videos with humans.
No surprises that we're very good at spotting even the most subtle differences while looking at other people.
- what subreddits do _you_ subscribe to?
I've been doing some content with people at https://industrialallusions.com
by adenta - Relax its only been 3 years, it's going to get a lot better not worse from here on.by agentifysh
- So, where is the download? I can't find it on Github, and on your web page the download button is disabled.
Also, will this run on RTX 4090 with 24GB memory?
Thank you!
by Fischgericht - > SANA-WM uses only ~213K public video clips with metric-scale pose supervision, completes training in 15 days on 64 H100s, and generates each 60-second clip on a single GPU; its distilled variant runs on a single RTX 5090 with NVFP4 quantization to denoise a 60s 720p clip in 34s.by ireadmevs
- There's a 5 second version available: https://huggingface.co/Efficient-Large-Model/SANA-Video_2B_7...
- Scroll down and there are more videos --- seems like models will be there "soon".by mjgil
- Gist:
> 720p, 1-min video generation with 6-DoF camera control
As nl said,
> The model is out here: https://huggingface.co/Efficient-Large-Model/SANA-Video_2B_7...
README says "intended for research use only"
Code license is Apache 2.0
Model license (nvidia open...) says
(As usual: model output is unrestricted, and also unprotectable absent human authoring)Models are commercially usable. You are free to create and distribute Derivative Modelsby w10-1 - The linked model does not claim to support camera control, it doesn't appear to be SANA-WM. You might be getting confused.by avaer
- warning: viewing the videos that auto play on that page shot up my downloads to 350Mbps on that page