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...

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 robotics

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.

I believe the idea is to offer simulation of ideas to test out new tasks AND something like dreaming.

Games. Build campaigns in hours instead of months. Make it possible for users to create their own campaigns, move the action to different game worlds - 'gimme Mario Kart in the ${favourite_game} world', etc.

It's a step towards something else?

Digital twin?

Put them in a robot so that it can navigate the physical world like humans. Self-driving cars.