Descriptions:
Uber could not exist without GPS. Ahmed Ahres uses that to argue real time is a change of medium rather than a speedup: before GPS you consulted a map somebody else had already made, and afterwards your own position became something you could act on continuously. He runs the same argument through film. Once a viewfinder showed you what you were shooting, you could adjust while shooting, and that is the reason Instagram and TikTok were possible at all.
Generated video today sits on the wrong side of that line. You prompt, you wait, you get a file back, and there is nothing further to do with it. His definition of world models is not Gaussian splatting and not a longer clip, but video that is interactive, effectively infinite, and generated fast enough to steer, which he demonstrates by prompting a cat into a scene while that scene is still generating. What it unlocks divides three ways: control, which he sums up as instant feedback being the ultimate form of it; character driven worlds that reach past games into robotics training data and into education; and live avatars, which he is refreshingly candid are still not working properly. The engineering consequence is that none of the batch playbook carries over. You are streaming pixels rather than returning files, every session is stateful and has to remember what happened when a character looked away, and sub 100 millisecond latency means putting GPUs near users rather than in one region.
Speaker info:
– https://x.com/Boudatw
– https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahmedahres/
– https://www.ahmedahres.com
Timestamps:
0:00 – World models, defined as real time interactive video
1:44 – What happens when video becomes programmable
3:25 – Maps to GPS, and film to viewfinder
5:04 – Model one: infinite, interactive, real time
5:52 – Control, advertising, and instant feedback
7:32 – Model two: controllable worlds, robotics, education
9:13 – Model three: live avatars, not cracked yet
10:06 – What people are actually building on it
12:37 – Why real time infrastructure is not batch infrastructure
16:10 – Evaluation is still an unsolved problem
