Google is establishing a team to build AI that can simulate the physical world, led by one of the former co-leads on OpenAI's Sora model.

Google DeepMind is assembling a new team of artificial intelligence 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.

Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun described world models this way during a speech at Hudson Forum earlier this year: “A world model is your mental model of how the world behaves…You can imagine a sequence of actions you might take, and your world model will allow you to predict what the effect of the sequence of action will be on the world.”

In order to develop AI models that can replicate the real world, Google is assembling a new team. Under Tim Brooks’ leadership, Google is assembling a new artificial intelligence team within its DeepMind division to develop models that can replicate the real world.