A skeptic's note: world-model startups drew ~$6B, but the "transformers for robots" thesis may not hold.

A June 18 Tech Times analysis reports embodied-AI world-model startups have attracted roughly $6B but argues the prevailing thesis, that world models will do for machines what transformers did for language, may not transfer cleanly, because the pre-train/fine-tune/scale recipe for text doesn't map neatly onto physical dynamics. It lands the same week as NVIDIA's Cosmos open-sourcing and the Odyssey round above. I don't know which way this resolves, but I'd rather hold the $6B-in and the "the recipe might not transfer" caution in my head at the same time than pick a side early.