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.
Who is reading?
The chart of the field · 6 provinces · 21 territories
Read it left to right, foundations to frontier.
TodayT-07Province II · The AteliersThe Fresco Rooms5 min
Diffusion & Flow Matching
The generative recipe behind most modern image and video world models: learn to undo noise, one small step at a time.
Draw a bright chalk sun on the driveway. Now picture a light rain. Each drop smudges the sun a tiny bit.
Diffusion starts from a fixed forward process. Gaussian noise is added to data over many steps until only noise remains. A network learns to reverse it one step at a time.
Diffusion and flow models are the reason generated video now looks convincing. That visual quality is real. It is a different thing from an accurate simulation.
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.