I didn’t come into research wanting to work on world models. I came into research because, at Huawei, a problem I knew nothing about (acoustic echo cancellation on sub-200ms frames) turned out to have a beautiful fix borrowed from classical signal processing, and nobody had tried it. That was enough to convince me research was a thing I could do, and wanted to keep doing.
Then the AI City Challenge happened, and I noticed our caption model couldn’t keep two agents’ descriptions from conflicting. That pushed me toward World models as shared substrate.
Then IMLE happened, and I learned that Every conditioning choice is a hidden assumption. That pushed me toward caring about how we encode worlds, not just generate them.
Then the Reachy Mini pilot happened. That showed me the whole argument in a single Wizard-of-Oz setup.
By the time I was writing the SoP, the question had stopped being whether to do a PhD and started being which lab. That’s roughly when you know.