Danijar Hafner just left DeepMind. He's behind the Dreamer series of models which are IMO the most promising direction for world models anyone has come up with yet. I'm wondering where he's headed. Maybe he could end up at LeCun's startup?
In Dreamer 4 they are able to train an agent to play Minecraft with enough skill to obtain diamonds, without ever playing the game at all. Only by watching humans play. They first build a world model, then train the agent purely in scenarios imagined by the world model, requiring zero extra data or experience. Hopefully it's obvious how generating data from a world model might be useful for training agents in domains where we don't have datasets like the entire internet just sitting around ready-made for us to use.
In Dreamer 4 they are able to train an agent to play Minecraft with enough skill to obtain diamonds, without ever playing the game at all. Only by watching humans play. They first build a world model, then train the agent purely in scenarios imagined by the world model, requiring zero extra data or experience. Hopefully it's obvious how generating data from a world model might be useful for training agents in domains where we don't have datasets like the entire internet just sitting around ready-made for us to use.
https://danijar.com/project/dreamer4/