At the All In conference this week, a panel on world models revealed one of the most mysterious corners of the AI world. The big players — Yann LeCun's AMI Labs and Fei-Fei Li's World Labs — have accumulated enormous buzz and funding, but they rank remarkably low on the trying-to-make-money scale.
When pressed on commercialization timelines, the responses were uniformly cagey. Michael Rabbat, AMI Labs co-founder and VP of World Models, said only: We will talk about it when we are ready to talk about it. Even the companies' data suppliers are in the dark. Alex de Vigan, CEO of Physicl, told TechCrunch: I wish they would tell us more. We could build more useful data if we knew what they were working on.
The secrecy stems from a fundamental dynamic in the space. World models automate spatial intelligence, and the same core technology could power robotics, interactive video, self-driving systems, or manufacturing. AMI has already explored biomedicine, manufacturing, and robotics through various partnerships — but which paths will actually become products remains unclear.
The competitive calculus reinforces the opacity. If AMI announced a specific product tomorrow, competitors — other world-model companies, neolabs, even OpenAI and Anthropic — would flood into the space. The same easy fundraising that lets companies build under the radar also funds their potential rivals once a market path crystallizes.
As TechCrunch's Russell Brandom noted, it is a classic dark forest scenario from Liu Cixin: if you do not know who else is in the woods, it is best not to attract attention.
