Every major AI lab has committed. From startups to trillion-dollar companies, the race to build world models that understand physics and causality is the defining challenge of this decade.
World Labs - Fei-Fei Li's startup now in talks at $5B valuation. Raised $230M in 2024 at $1B. Building "large world models" for spatial intelligence. Marble product launched Nov 2025.
AMI Labs - Yann LeCun left Meta Dec 2025 to build world models. Raising EUR 500M at EUR 3B valuation pre-launch. Paris HQ. Partnership with Nabla for FDA-certifiable healthcare AI.
Google DeepMind - Genie 3 launched Jan 2026. First real-time interactive world model. 24fps, 720p. Public prototype via Project Genie. DeepMind calls it a "stepping stone toward AGI."
NVIDIA - Cosmos world foundation models downloaded 2M+ times. Jensen Huang: "Physical AI will revolutionize the $50 trillion manufacturing and logistics industries."
Meta - V-JEPA 2 released Jan 2026. Trained on 1M+ hours of video. 65-80% success on robotics tasks with only 62 hours of robot training data.
Runway - GWM-1 world model launched Dec 2025. Autoregressive, real-time, controllable via camera pose and robot commands.
Siemens x NVIDIA - Building the first fully AI-driven manufacturing sites starting 2026. Digital Twin Composer. PepsiCo achieving 20% throughput increase on deployment.
NVIDIA Alpamayo-R1 - Open-sourced at NeurIPS 2025. 10B-parameter reasoning VLA model with 1,727-hour driving dataset spanning 25 countries.
Physical AI Partners - Figure AI, 1X, Gatik, Oxa, PlusAI, X-Humanoid using Cosmos world foundation models for robotics.
Research & Academic Validation
NeurIPS 2025 - NVIDIA presented 70+ papers on AI reasoning, world models, and autonomous systems.
$202.3B AI Investment - Total AI sector investment in 2025, up 75% YoY. Big Tech spending expected to exceed $500B in 2026.
World Model Survey Papers - Multiple IEEE/arXiv surveys published in 2025 cataloging the rapid growth of world model architectures and applications.