Worlds for Agents: World Models and the Agents That Learn Inside Them

A Frontier Research Club session hosted at SignalFire.

If a model can generate a world, an agent can practice in it. This session asks how far that loop actually goes.

World models promise to make agent training cheap: generate a world, let an agent act in it, score the attempt, repeat. In late 2025, DeepMind's SIMA 2 agent kept improving inside worlds generated by Genie 3, with no new human demonstrations. Whether this scales comes down to two open questions: can a generated world hold together for longer than a few minutes, and do skills learned inside one carry over to the real world?

Bonnie Li is a Research Scientist at OpenAI. At Google DeepMind, she worked on Gemini, the Genie world models and SIMA 2, and she began her research career at Mila with Yoshua Bengio.

Pre-reads go to confirmed guests the week before. Come having read them; the discussion starts at depth.

The Frontier Research Club is a curated forum for rigorous, technical discussion at the frontier of AI. We convene researchers from the frontier labs, Stanford, Berkeley and leading startups to examine concrete work (papers, methods and results) with a bias toward assumptions, evaluation methodology, failure modes, and what would count as convincing evidence.

Each session features 2 talks selected for rigor and discussion value. Presentations are intentionally brief so the majority of time is reserved for questions and critique. Papers and supporting materials are shared in advance to ensure a high-baseline conversation.

Agenda

5:30pm: Doors open5:30pm – 6:30pm: Networking + light dinner6:30pm – 8:00pm: Research presentations + discussion8:00pm – 8:30pm: Networking

Presenters & topics

Talk 1 — Bonnie Li, Research Scientist, OpenAIWorld Models as Training Grounds for Agents (working title)

Bonnie will walk through what it takes for a world model to be something an agent can learn in, not just watch: worlds that stay consistent as the agent acts, respond to what it does, and come with tasks and rewards generated alongside them. She'll close on the failure modes that matter for training, including agents that learn to exploit the simulator's errors instead of the skill.

Talk 2: TBA

Want to present your work?

If you have a research paper you’d like to discuss at one of our next sessions, please submit it for consideration. ​Submit your paper here!

Who should attend

  • Researchers working on world models, video generation and simulation

  • Reinforcement learning and embodied-AI researchers training agents in virtual environments

  • Robotics teams working on sim-to-real transfer

  • Game, simulation and interactive-media engineers building generated worlds

  • Infrastructure teams training and serving large video and world models

  • Founders and technical leaders building physical AI and agent products

Capacity is limited.

We will take photos and short video clips for event recap and promotion. By attending, you consent to being photographed and recorded, and to the use of those images and clips by the organizers on social media and other event marketing channels.

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Hosted by

The Frontier Syndicate is a venture community connecting frontier tech researchers, builders, and investors through curated convenings and early-stage capital. Across the Bay Area, we host a recurring series of research forums, builder nights, and intimate investor dinners — and back exceptional companies emerging from the labs, communities, and technical networks we convene.

SignalFire is an AI-native venture firm investing in early-stage applied AI. Its Beacon AI platform gives portfolio founders data-driven support across recruiting, go-to-market and growth.