They are the people who made artificial intelligence what it is. They built the datasets, designed the architecture, and trained the systems that now write our emails, generate our code, and pass the bar exam. And increasingly, quietly, they are all working on the same problem—a problem that implies today’s most powerful AI, for all its staggering capability, is still missing something fundamental.
Goldman Sachs has a name for what’s missing. A new report from the Goldman Sachs Global Institute, authored by co-head George Lee and managing director Dan Keyserling, covers what is known in the industry as “the world model”—and argues that solving it represents the next decisive leap in artificial intelligence. Not a marginal improvement. A qualitative shift in what machines can do, and how consequentially they can do it.
