Most discussion of world models treats “the world state” as a given object you read off and predict forward. I keep getting stuck one step earlier: what is a world state, concretely?
The open questions I can’t yet answer cleanly:
- There’s no uniform representation of a 3D world, and no uniform representation of its state. So which one do you commit to, and what does that choice quietly assume?
- Does the state have to be maintained in real time, or is it something you reconstruct on demand?
- Where does the data defining it even come from?
The reason this isn’t just bookkeeping: the representation is the problem, not a detail you settle before the real work. That’s the same lesson as Every conditioning choice is a hidden assumption, the encoding has to match the thing it’s trying to steer. A “world state” you can’t ground in a representation is just a word.
A seedling, deliberately. Back to World models as shared substrate.