Simulating reality

Last week, I sat down with a simulation of my family at dinner, ten years in the future. My daughter was twelve, discussing her summer plans. We talked about AI-powered education and her experiences growing up with it. This wasn't a daydream – it was a sophisticated world simulation powered by AI.

WorldSim and WebSim are pushing simulation in radical directions. One creates detailed social scenarios using prompt engineering; the other builds entire simulated internets. Meanwhile, Genesis is running physics 500 times faster than ever before. We're not just predicting the future – we're running it in advance.

O3 changes the game entirely. It doesn't just make predictions; it generates multiple solutions and verifies them against each other. Think of the implications: AI that can actually check its own work.

But here's the thing about simulating humans: there's no clear right answer. You can verify if a bridge design will hold, but how do you verify if a conversation feels real?

That's where multi-agent systems come in. Instead of one AI trying to do everything, teams of specialized agents work together. NVIDIA's Voyager shows what's possible - a community of AIs living in Minecraft, learning through direct experience. When it builds something, reality itself becomes the verifier.

A healthcare company recently used this to simulate patient outcomes. A city simulated fifty years of development. We're moving from asking "what happened?" to exploring "what could happen?"

That's worth getting excited about.