Comment by echelon
21 hours ago
Robotics: $88B TAM
Gaming: $350B TAM
All media and entertainment: $3T TAM
Manufacturing: $5T TAM
Roughly the same story.
This tech is going to revolutionize "films" and gaming. The entire entertainment industry is going to transform around it.
When people aren't buying physical things, they're distracting themselves with media. Humans spend more time and money on that than anything else. Machines or otherwise.
AI impact on manufacturing will be huge. AI impact on media and entertainment will be huge. And these world models can be developed in a way that you develop exposure and competency for both domains.
edit: You can argue that manufacturing will boom when we have robotics that generalize. But you can also argue that entertainment will boom when we have holodecks people can step into.
Not so sure around gaming. While it opens some interesting "generate quest on demand" and "quick demo" cases, an infinite world generator wouldn't really vibe with people.
They would try it once, think its cool and stop there. You would probably have a niche group of "world surfers" that would keep playing with it.
Most people do not have an idea on what they would want to play and how it would look like - they want a curated experience. As games adapted to the mass market, they became more and more curated experiences with lots of hand-holding the player.
Yeah, a holodeck would be popular, but that's a whole different technology ballpark and akin to talking about flying cars in this context.
This will have a giant impact on robotics and general models tho, as now they can simulate action/reaction inside a world in parallel, choosing the best course, by just having a picture of the world and probably a generated image of the end result or "validators" to check if task is accomplished.
And while robotics is $88B TAM nowadays, expect it to hit $888B in the next 5-10 years, with world simulators like this being one of the reasons.
From the team side, gotta be cool to build this, feels like one of those things all devs dream about.
The current robotics industry is $88B. You have to take into account the potential future industry of general purpose robots that replace a big chunk of blue-collar work.
Robots is also just one example. A hypothetically powerful AI agent (which might also use a world model) that controls a mouse and keyboard could replace a big chunk of white-collar work too.
Those are worth 10's of trillions of dollars. You can argue about whether they are actually possible, but the people backing this tech think they are.
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