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Visions of AI is a new feature format I’m experimenting with that will amount to a short profile on an AI or emerging tech startup. The cadence of this style of article is unknown as of yet, but there are a lot of fascinating startups I want to discuss and share about.
This is designed to be light evening reading to go out at a time-slot of 8 pm EST.
In an AI boom you would expect new kinds of AI startups to emerge and get funding. While China has what it calls the world robot conference, to complement the vast limitations of large language models (LLMs), another kind of model is being pushed forward – the elusive world model.
A Starting definition of a World-Model
“A world model is an internal mental simulation constructed by an AI system that represents the physics, spatial relationships, geometry, and dynamics of the real world.”
As we build the physical infrastructure to power the compute for some much debated and uncertain AI-future, all these robots and IoT systems needs a better understanding of their environments.
Given the limitations of LLMs, it’s not clear how long or how useful these physics based and simulation friendly world models might take to be able to fast-track the training of our suddenly humanoid looking robotics projects.
While China has established itself a formidable open-weight model builder, that western companies are increasingly building upon (like Harvey building a model on a Moonshot AI base), the new race to world models is heating up.
As a Canadian it was exciting to hear that Khosla Ventures and Radical Ventures are leading the seed funding of what it turns out to be one of the largest seed financings ever raised by a Canadian startup. It’s called Veeda and is by three former Nvidia employees with ties to the University of Toronto.
Veeda Innovation will focus on building multi-modal world models.
Embodied intelligence and physical AI are really hitting a feverish pitch in the late summer and early Fall of 2026. On August 19th we learned that renowned computer scientist Sanja Fidler, is setting up shop with former Nvidia colleagues and raising $90 million in a seed funding round today. Sanja is a Slovenian-Canadian AI researcher held in very high regard.
There are now around a half dozen very good world model startups with extremely good funding.
“We started Veeda because we believe robotics will reshape the world—changing how we move people and goods, how we manufacture and build, and how we operate in the physical world.”
The publication called The Logic was one of the first to break the story. If you are a robotics enthusiast this is very exciting. As Anthropic sets for a record breaking IPO there’s some indication it has serious interest in the field and perhaps even acquiring Physical Intelligence.
Helping Robots Learn and Train Faster
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