A central 'world model'—a dynamic, predictive representation of a scientific domain—is crucial for automating science. It acts as a shared state and memory, updated by experiments and analysis, much like a Git repository coordinates software engineers, allowing different AI agents to contribute to a unified understanding.
The creative process with AI involves exploring many options, most of which are imperfect. This makes the collaboration a version control problem. Users need tools to easily branch, suggest, review, and merge ideas, much like developers use Git, to manage the AI's prolific but often flawed output.
Rather than programming AI agents with a company's formal policies, a more powerful approach is to let them observe thousands of actual 'decision traces.' This allows the AI to discover the organization's emergent, de facto rules—how work *actually* gets done—creating a more accurate and effective world model for automation.
Tools like Git were designed for human-paced development. AI agents, which can make thousands of changes in parallel, require a new infrastructure layer—real-time repositories, coordination mechanisms, and shared memory—that traditional systems cannot support.
Language is just one 'keyhole' into intelligence. True artificial general intelligence (AGI) requires 'world modeling'—a spatial intelligence that understands geometry, physics, and actions. This capability to represent and interact with the state of the world is the next critical phase of AI development beyond current language models.
Startups and major labs are focusing on "world models," which simulate physical reality, cause, and effect. This is seen as the necessary step beyond text-based LLMs to create agents that can truly understand and interact with the physical world, a key step towards AGI.
Large language models are insufficient for tasks requiring real-world interaction and spatial understanding, like robotics or disaster response. World models provide this missing piece by generating interactive, reason-able 3D environments. They represent a foundational shift from language-based AI to a more holistic, spatially intelligent AI.
To enable shared knowledge, a "cognitive memory fabric" is needed. This architecture combines exploratory, probabilistic AI agents with formal, deterministic representations of the world (like digital twins), providing a powerful yet safe environment for innovation.
The AI's ability to handle novel situations isn't just an emergent property of scale. Waive actively trains "world models," which are internal generative simulators. This enables the AI to reason about what might happen next, leading to sophisticated behaviors like nudging into intersections or slowing in fog.
Moving beyond isolated AI agents requires a framework mirroring human collaboration. This involves agents establishing common goals (shared intent), building a collective knowledge base (shared knowledge), and creating novel solutions together (shared innovation).
The ultimate goal isn't just modeling specific systems (like protein folding), but automating the entire scientific method. This involves AI generating hypotheses, choosing experiments, analyzing results, and updating a 'world model' of a domain, creating a continuous loop of discovery.