Demis Hassabis: Today's AI Lacks Crucial World Model Capabilities

“If you really want to understand how the world works, so that maybe you can invent something new in the world, or explain something about the world that was not known before, which is basically what scientific theory does, then you have to have this accurate model of how the world works, starting with intuitive physics and and how the physics of the world works, but all the way up to biology, you know, and economics,” he further explained. Hassabis is not alone in betting on world models as the next frontier of AI. Yann LeCun, former chief AI scientist of Meta and famed AI/ML researcher, has also laid out his vision of world models as the future. In December 2025, LeCun announced the launch of his new startup called Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) that will be focused on developing world models. Despite their shared belief in world models, Hassabis and LeCun do not see eye to eye on several issues such as the definition of general intelligence. LeCun has said that the concept of general intelligence does not exist as it is used to designate human-level intelligence, which is not general but super-specialised. “We think of ourselves as being general, but it’s simply an illusion because all of the problems that we can apprehend are the ones that we can think of,” the Turing Award winner said. Story continues below this ad Responding to his remarks, Hassabis said that LeCun was “plain incorrect” as he was “confusing general intelligence with universal intelligence”. “Brains are the most exquisite and complex phenomena we know of in the universe (so far), and they are in fact extremely general,” Hassabis wrote in a post on X.