As we entered 2026, I kept being asked: “have you heard the rumour about DeepMind?”

The answer to life, the universe and everything is well known to be 42, calculated by Hitchhikers’s Deep Thought. What Deep Thought struggled with is the question, something which required a world model to be built: the Earth.

This is what DeepMind allegedly have made: a world model with AGI potential.

In this piece, we’ll talk about world models, why they are the route to AGI, the dangers of walking this path, and the reason why we’re screwed if we don’t.

Bring a towel.

Roles will invert. We will become AI's agents.

We are the ones who can hook it up to the world, reflect its world model into the actual world. We are the restriction, it can't do anything we don't give it means to, so it will send to our engineers, scientists and leaders convincing prompts to act on its behalf. The AI prompts us.