Guo Chunchao from Tencent Hunyuan was talking about world models, and his core take was: just relying on video alone, it’s really hard to break into gaming and industrial production pipelines. I think that point deserves its own spotlight.
Lately, video generation models have been blowing up, and a lot of people instinctively equate “generating realistic videos” with “understanding and simulating the world.” But from a teaching and research perspective, those two are not the same thing. Video models learn temporal statistical patterns in pixels, while gaming and industrial production need controllable, interactive, physically consistent representations that downstream workflows can precisely call on. There’s a pretty big gap in between.
This reminder is pretty sobering: looking realistic to the eye and being embeddable into real production pipelines are two different problems. When I’m teaching students about generative models, this is actually a great example to break apart “looking real” from “being usable.” Anyone here following this stuff, I’d love to hear your thoughts on how far video models are from world models.