Chinese physical AI start-up proposes new paradigm that bypasses OpenAI, Meta road maps

Shanghai-based Fysics AI says Fysiverse is a ‘new-generation physics-based world model that adheres to real-world physical laws’

A Chinese physical AI start-up has launched a new world model designed to simulate reality by embedding the laws of physics directly into its code – a departure from the data-driven approaches favoured by American tech giants like OpenAI and Meta Platforms.

Shanghai-based Fysics AI announced the launch of the Fysiverse, which it described as a “new-generation physics-based world model that adheres to real-world physical laws”, in a post on its WeChat social media account on Wednesday.

The start-up, founded by former Nvidia senior manager Zhang Lihua, said the model “represents a new paradigm” that could effectively address issues commonly faced by currently available world models, such as “physical illusions, reasoning failures, and breakdowns in non-standard scenarios”.

The world model sector, used to create content and train robots or self-driving technology, is currently dominated by three major paradigms.

The second way is to let the model, without knowledge of physics, construct its own rules of the world in a black box. Meta’s V-JEPA series, short for video joint embedding predictive architecture, is one such system that takes a “self-supervised learning approach”, according to Meta’s website.