{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The Futurecaster Podcast with Kimberly Bates","title":"Why Agentic AI, AGI and Robotics Need World Models, Not Word Models | Dan Mapes, Renowned AI Founder","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3634,"description":"AI Chatbots were just the opening act. The real future of AI isn’t just on your screen- it’s out here with us, learning, moving, and shaping the physical world. While the world obsesses over chatbots and text generators, a quiet revolution is unfolding, and it may be the real path to Agentic AI, Superintelligence, and AGI. When most people imagine the future of AI, they picture smarter assistants that book vacations, automate tasks, or shop for you. But the real breakthrough won’t come from scaling models- it will come from “embodied AI,” machines that learn as babies do: by seeing, touching, hearing, moving, and constantly updating their internal model of how the world works. These are called world models.  Just as infants spend hours wiggling their fingers and watching gravity in action, future systems will learn through physical experience, building a far deeper understanding of the messy, unpredictable real world. This shift is huge because language models can only take what’s been given to them and guess at reality; they don’t truly understand the consequences. Embodied AI is what will unlock reliable robots, real autonomy, and systems that can reason, plan, and act with common sense.  In this episode of the Futurecaster Podcast, Chie Futurist Kimberly Bates speaks with Dan Mapes, Founder of the Spatial Web Foundation and VERSES AI, whose Chief Scientist, Karl Friston, is one of the most published and respected neuroscientists in the world. Mapes argues that the true breakthrough will come from the Free Energy Principle and Active Inference- a neuroscience-inspired framework that could give machines the ability to understand, adapt, act, and self-regulate in the world like humans and living systems.  The conversation also touches on the democratization of intelligence, the evolving role of brand strategy, and the implications of AI in e-commerce, healthcare, and autonomous systems, ultimately painting a hopeful picture of the future of technology and its...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/76DG8HS37Z_QKHU9wnUxMyqmpzvZsue5kXaGT34OHOM/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9kMzdl/OTZkODg0MTZiMGYw/ZGRlOGZkMzcyZTFi/YTc2NC5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}