New Video from @Computerphile Explores "World Foundation Model" in AI

The video explores the concept of a "world foundation model," an artificial intelligence (AI) model designed to understand and simulate the physical world. Unlike standard diffusion models that generate images without understanding physical laws, this model aims to integrate concepts such as gravity, friction, and Newton's laws. It must also handle more complex notions like object permanence and temporal stability, which is the ability to track an object consistently over time and space. One of the major challenges is making these models work on various types of hardware, ranging from powerful GPU servers to small devices like Jetson units used on forklifts. Optimization and model distillation are essential to make them usable on less powerful equipment. The video also highlights the importance of synthetic data for training these models, allowing for the simulation of varied and complex scenarios that would be difficult to capture in the real world. The world model is compared to 3D environments used in video games, but with a crucial difference: it must predict physical interactions and future behaviors without being explicitly programmed for each situation. This allows for much greater flexibility and adaptability than systems based on predefined rules. The video also addresses the issue of model training, distinguishing between pre-training and post-training. Data can be collected physically or generated synthetically to cover a wide range of scenarios. An example given is that of an autonomous car that must recognize and react to unexpected situations, such as a person running after a bear on the road. Finally, the video discusses the practical implications and technical challenges, including the need to distill models to make them lighter and faster while retaining their accuracy. It also mentions the importance of choosing relevant training scenarios to avoid overloading the model with useless information. For those who want to try this model, Nvidia Cosmos is available as open source under an open model license. However, it is advised to carefully plan specific needs and choose appropriate training scenarios to achieve the best results.