The last wave of AI learned to describe the world. The next needs to learn how the world pushes back. A Cambridge startup thinks the answer hides inside video games.
Worldmodeldata has raised £7m (€8m) to turn gameplay into AI training data, Tech Funding News reported. London’s Iona Star Capital led the seed round. Lord Richard Allan, Meta’s former public-policy chief for Europe, joins as chairman.
What it actually sells
The target is a new kind of AI called a world model. Where a chatbot reacts to text, a world model tries to predict how an environment changes when you act on it. That demands a rare kind of data: an action, and the consequence that follows, aligned frame by frame.
Games happen to record exactly that. Worldmodeldata licenses footage and engine data from titles built on Unreal and Unity, rather than scraping the web. It then packages the video, the player inputs and the underlying 3D state into clean datasets. The buyers would be labs building physical AI, robots and self-driving cars.
