This is the next big thing in corporate AI

"Large language models look powerful, but they are fundamentally rented intelligence. You pay a monthly fee to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or some other big tech, you access them through APIs, you tune them lightly, and you apply them to generic tasks: summarizing, drafting, searching, assisting. They make organizations more efficient, but they don't make them meaningfully different. A world model is something else entirely."

"Not because language models aren't useful, with their obvious limitations they are, but because they are rapidly becoming commodities. When everyone has access to roughly the same models, trained on roughly the same data, the real question stops being who has the best AI and becomes who understands their world best. That's where world models come in. From rented intelligence to owned understanding"

AI adoption initially meant integrating large language models into workflows and experimenting with prompts. Those models are becoming commodities because many organizations access similar models trained on similar data. Renting external models improves efficiency but does not create distinctive, internal understanding. A corporate world model is an internal representation of customers, operations, constraints, risks, and feedback loops. Such a model can predict outcomes, test decisions, and learn from experience. Owning a world model provides proprietary understanding and strategic differentiation that cannot be rented through generic external language models.

Read at Fast Company