World Models Explained: The Architecture That Could Replace Transformers

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash In the span of a few months, bridging late 2025 and early 2026, the signal became hard to ignore. Yann LeCun - one of the three original deep learning pioneers, and the researcher who helped invent the convolutional neural network - left Meta after twelve years to launch AMI Labs, raising over a billion dollars at a multi-billion dollar valuation before releasing a single product. Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs shipped Marble, the first commercially available world model.