Do large language models actually understand the world, or are they just very good at pretending? Does it even matter?
Our recent special issue in the Royal Society, “World Models in Natural and Artificial Intelligence,” brings together pioneers across AI, biology, and philosophy to argue that the path to true intelligence runs through something deeper: the ability to model not just language, but causality, the self, and the physical world.
Featuring contributions from Douglas Hofstadter, Michael Levin, Josh Tenenbaum, Samuel Gershman, Melanie Mitchell, and others, the collection asks a radical question:
What if the next leap in AI requires not just more data, but systems that model themselves?
Here are 3 ideas that might redefine how we build AI:
1. Capability is not the same as true intelligence.
Current foundation models are incredibly capable, but they often lack true emergent intelligence. They learn surface statistics instead of compact, causal abstractions. Simply scaling compute will not fix this fundamental issue.
2. Self-modeling is an engineering primitive, not a philosophical luxury.
New research in the issue shows that when networks learn to predict their own internal states, they compress and simplify, becoming more efficient as a form of regularization. For physical AI and future agents, a self-model is what will allow them to adapt their own skills and morphologies in real-time.
3. The hardest problems in AI are continuous with the hardest problems of life.
Biological minds do not passively ingest data; they actively explore, driven by empowerment to increase control over their environment. If world modeling is about an agent representing itself in relation to its environment to survive and adapt, then general AI may need to look much more like artificial life.
The takeaway is that the next leap in AI won’t come from just scaling up next-token prediction, but rather from systems that are agentic, self-referential, and temporally grounded.
Read the introductory essay and the full special issue here:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsta/issue/384/2320
What do you think is the most important missing ingredient in today’s AI systems?
