Google is building its own World Modelling team to help it achieve AGI goals

By Matthew Griffin Virtual World 9th March 2025

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

LLM AI’s read and regurgitate text, compared to what the rest of the world has to offer that’s quite basic, so companies are building World Models to boost AI capabilities and utility.

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A while ago I talked about how companies like Amazon and Nvidia and others were developing digital twin simulations of the real world – including everything from the Earth itself to neighbourhoods and offices. And now, years down the line, Google DeepMind is assembling its own team of Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers to develop “World Models” that can simulate physical environments. The initiative will be led by Tim Brooks, a former co-lead for OpenAI’s Sora project who joined DeepMind in October to work on Google’s video generation and world simulators.

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World models are a relatively new development within AI that could serve a variety of purposes, such as creating real-time interactive media environments for video games and movies, and realistic training scenarios for robots and other AI systems. It’s also part of Google’s push to achieve an Artificial General Intelligence system, or AGI, before its competitors.

“DeepMind has ambitious plans to make massive generative models that simulate the world,” Brooks announced in an X post on Monday. Brooks included two open job listings for research engineers and scientists who will help to advance AI “world models” capable of simulating real-world scenarios by solving problems around training “at massive scale,” curating training data, and studying how they can be integrated with multimodal language models.

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“We believe scaling pretraining on video and multimodal data is on the critical path to artificial general intelligence,” DeepMind said in the job descriptions. “World models will power numerous domains, such as visual reasoning and simulation, planning for embodied agents, and real-time interactive entertainment.”

The race to be the first to declare AGI is heating up, so Google’s focus here isn’t surprising. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said that the company has cracked how to build AGI, and that autonomous AI agents may start to meaningfully join workforces this year.

There are several competitors who already have a head start over DeepMind’s world modelling project, including Nvidia’s Cosmos platform for advancing physical AI, autonomous vehicle, and robot development; and the World Labs startup created by “The Godmother of AI,” Fei-Fei Li.

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The new DeepMind team will work alongside existing Google AI projects including its flagship Gemini AI models, Veo video generator, and Genie — Google’s prior world model for simulating playable 3D environments in real-time.

Matthew Griffin / About Author

Described by NASA as a "Walking Encyclopaedia of the Future" and one of the world’s most in demand keynote speakers Matthew Griffin, Founder and Futurist in Chief of the 311 Institute, a global Futures and Deep Futures advisory firm, is a multi-award winning Futurist and strategic foresight expert, author, lecturer, mentor, podcast and YouTube host.

With a distinguished career running global business units at Atos, EMC, and IBM today Matthew helps leaders and titans of industry from all over the world explore the impact of the inter sections of technology, culture, and leadership, then helps them create high performance organisations that can continuously disrupt, outpace, and outthink their competition.

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