World Models

Imagine inheriting a system built by three teams that never talked to each other. Three microservices, all describing the same warehouse: one answers questions about it in text, one renders preview images of the shelves, one drives the forklift. Each has its own database, its own schema, and none of them agree on what’s actually sitting on shelf B4. Any architect who has seen this knows the fix — one canonical store, thin adapters at the edges. ...

What if you could fly a virtual camera through any street in a real city — not a game engine, not a pre-recorded video, but a freshly generated, photorealistic view based on actual street photos? That’s exactly what the Seoul World Model (SWM) does. The paper “Grounding World Simulation Models in a Real-World Metropolis” introduces a city-scale world model world model A neural network that learns the dynamics and visual appearance of an environment, allowing it to ‘imagine’ new views and trajectories it has never seen directly. that generates video grounded in real geography — not in imagined scenes. ...