World Model Architectures: A Survey (2018–2026)

There's been such a massive Cambrian explosion of world models in development that I decided to create a survey of all the world models I've encountered to show just how active this space has become.

From the models that train Waymo vehicles and industrial robotic systems, weather forecasting models, and Nobel-prize winning protein folding classifiers (arguably), to even contested generative video models — I've grouped these into roughly a dozen model families and made an infographic to illustrate the activity in this research and engineering domain over the last 8 years or so

By no means is this list comprehensive, and I'm sure I'll discover many new things over time that are not in this diagram. So I'll do my best to keep this regularly updated. If anyone is looking for more detailed notes on these families and lineages, and follow any updates I make to this survey, I created a GitHub repo for public study and examination of world models in applied AI research and engineering.

I hope folks find this useful!