A field survey · Edition III · October 2026 · 6 provinces · 21 territories
Machines that imagine before they act.
This atlas shows how a computer can keep a tiny copy of the world in its head. It guesses what happens next before it moves. Every page is told three ways. This telling is for you.
The Atlas explains how a machine builds a small copy of the world, predicts what comes next and plans with it. Every territory is told three ways. This telling covers the mechanism, the trade-offs and what to measure.
The Atlas explains how a machine builds a small copy of the world, predicts what comes next and plans with it. Every territory is told three ways. This telling covers the consequence, the risk and the money.
New here? Walk eight stops, in order
Who is reading?
The chart of the field · 6 provinces · 21 territories
Read it left to right, foundations to frontier.
TodayT-03Province I · The Founding CoastThe Coastline5 min
Environments, Simulators & Rollouts
The interface between a learned model and the environment it is trying to predict, and what a "rollout" actually is.
Put a dot on one side of a sheet of paper. Put a star on the other side. Now close your eyes and draw a straight line from the dot to the star.
An environment interface fixes how a model and the world exchange information. An observation comes in and an action goes out. A reward and the next observation come back.
This is the territory to question hardest before trusting a vendor demo. A demo usually shows a short rollout. A model can look flawless at five steps and fall apart at fifty.
From The Notebook today13 November 2026
ai agent memory: the old fact kept winning
One idea from the daily page, told three ways. Read it on The Notebook
Dispatch29 October 2026
The Platonic Representation Theorem, explained three ways
A new proof says text and image models can learn one shared map of the world. The training pairs decide it. All dispatches
InteractiveDrift
Watch a world model forget the room
Walk through a room while a model imagines it frame by frame. Then switch on the fixes researchers use. Try Drift
Books
Books in progress.
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Technical book · sneak peek Agents with Foresight World Models for Reliable Action in Digital Enterprises An agent can say nothing wrong and still act on an account that no longer exists. This book asks when an agent needs a world model and when a fresh read is enough. Read the sneak peek on The Notebook -
Technical book · sneak peek The World Outside the Model Engineering AI Agents for State, Authority and Reliable Action The engineering that keeps an agent valid while the world changes under it. One incident runs through the book. A finance agent pays one invoice twice. Read the sneak peek on The Notebook -
Novel · sneak peek BURN A fire takes a foothill town. A father is blamed. In prison, a crew of broken men builds a model of fire by hand. Read the sneak peek on The Notebook
Courses
Go deeper, one deck at a time.
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7 lessons
Joint embedding world models, from the ground up
I wrote this course to show how a model can predict the world without drawing it. Each lesson starts with a plain picture. It ends with the mechanism, the evidence and a decision from the grid.
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6 decks
Context engineering
6 mission decks on what a model sees and when. Prompt caching, retrieval, memory, tool design and agents that run for hours.
About this atlas
Why an atlas, and not a textbook.
The field of learned world models moves fast and cites itself in shorthand. JEPA, MPC and the ELBO can gatekeep as much as they clarify. This atlas charts the territory: what each idea is, how it sits next to its neighbours and why it matters to three very different readers at once.
Email course
One territory a day, by email
Pick a reader and get the next territory in your inbox each morning.