Right now there is (AFAIK) no world model product booking any meaningful revenue. So there's a decent chance WMs turn out to have no long-term utility at all.

However, there are a few promising markets, assuming WMs continue to get better and cheaper:

1. Robotics training / evaluation: modern end-to-end (sensors-to-control) robot policies require simulators that are almost indistinguishable from reality. If your sim is distinguishable from reality, the evaluation metrics you get from sim don't mean anything and the policies you train in sim don't work. World models will likely be the highest-fidelity robotics simulators, since WMs are data-driven and get arbitrarily more-realistic given more data/compute. This is why so many robotics companies have WM projects [1] [2] [3] [4].

2. Video frontends for agents: in the same way that today's frontier labs are building realtime voice interfaces [5] which behave like a phone call, realtime video interfaces will behave like a video call. Early forms of this don't feel compelling IMO [6] [7], but once the models can instantly blend between rendering the agent itself, drawing diagrams/visualizations, rendering video, etc. I can see it surpassing pure voice mode.

3. Entertainment: zero-shot world generation (i.e. holodeck, genie 3; paste in an image/video/text prompt and get a world) will be a fun toy but I'm not convinced it has any long-term value. I'm more optimistic about proper narrative experiences where each scene/level is a small, carefully-crafted world (behaving like a normal film scene if you don't touch the controls, and an uncharted/TLoU-style narrative game if you do), such that the sequence of scenes builds up a larger story.

[1] https://wayve.ai/thinking/gaia-3/

[2] https://xcancel.com/Tesla/status/1982255564974641628 / https://xcancel.com/ProfKuang/status/1996642397204394179

[3] https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-f...

[4] https://www.1x.tech/discover/world-model-self-learning

[5] https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/interaction-models/

[6] https://runwayml.com/news/introducing-runway-characters

[7] https://blog.character.ai/character-ais-real-time-video-brea...

SANA-WM, a 2.6B open-source world model for 1-minute 720p video