World Foundation Models Explained: The Future of AI in Robotics and Simulation

Physical AI needs two twins: a policy twin for decision making and a world twin for simulation.

But how do we build an accurate digital representation of the physical world that an AI can safely interact with and learn from?

Three key requirements for a robust world twin will be:

• Must generate physically accurate simulations
• Must handle multi-modal inputs (vision, text, actions)
• Must scale to handle real-world complexity

We don’t need perfect physics — we just need to be able to gracefully handle uncertainty and incomplete information enough for physical twin to learn, iterate and adapt to real life situations..

This means that we need to be able to:

• Embrace probabilistic outputs
• Focus on task-relevant physics
• Have robustness to errors

We want to generate useful approximations that enable downstream tasks.

Cosmos World Foundation Model (WFM) Platform from NVIDIA is a very solid step toward that goal.

How do we create digital twins?