Definition
Plain language
An AI's internal sense of how its environment works — what its actions do and how the world responds.
As stated in the literature
A model's learned representation of environment dynamics enabling prediction of next states; in ECHO, training a terminal agent to predict environment tokens is argued to instill a transferable world model, evidenced by cross-model prediction gains.
Also called: world models
Why it matters: An internal sense of how the world responds lets an AI plan ahead and adapt rather than blindly reacting step by step.
For example, an agent navigating a kitchen has one if it can predict that opening the fridge will reveal what's inside before it even acts.
Heard on the show
“And the deeper claim isn't about Hanoi at all — it's that a world model isn't a property a system has or doesn't have.”Episode 237 — The Model Built a Perfect Map of the Puzzle, Then Lost It