Starcast Join the waitlist
The Most Interesting Thing in AI

The Most Interesting Thing in AI

Building Models That See the World - Eric Xing with Nicholas Thompson

Oct 7, 2026 · 1h 14m

Coming soon to iPhone. Already have it? “Listen in Starcast” takes you straight there.

On this episode

About this episode

If you want AI to drive your car or simulate a cell or control a robot, it had better be able to understand the world it’s operating within. Eric Xing is one of the leading researchers working on this kind of AI, known as ‘world models.’ Unlike LLMs, which are trained largely on text data and predict the next token, world models aim to understand and simulate physical environments using multimodal data. Xing found his way to the field after a long trek through prestigious institutions, studying cancer before transitioning to machine learning. Now, as the president of Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence in the United Arab Emirates, he’s helping to train a generation of AI…