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Comment by D-Machine

18 days ago

AI ≠ LLM.

It would be more precise to say that complex world modeling is not done with LLMs, or that LLMs only supplement those world models. Robotics models are AI, calling them LLMs is incorrect (though they may use them internally in places).

The middle "L" in LLM refers to natural language. Calling everything language and words is not some gotcha, and sensor data is nothing like natural language. There are multiple streams / channels, where language is single-stream; sensor data is continuous and must not be tokenized; there are not long-term dependencies within and across streams in the same way that there are in language (tokens thousands of tokens back are often relevant, but sensor data from more than about a second ago is always irrelevant if we are talking about riding a bike), making self-attention expensive and less obviously useful; outputs are multi-channel and must be continuous and realtime, and it isn't even clear the recursive approach of LLMs could work here.

Another good example of world models informed by work in robotics is V-JEPA 2.

https://ai.meta.com/research/vjepa/

https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09985