This comes as peculiar, the 3d world generation demo that was on HN a short while ago was quite lackluster—many commented how underwhelming the end product was despite the insane valuation and world names working on the product.
I'm getting Theranos vibes all over again. I certainly hope this isn't another grift by getting our guards down as it was with Elizabeth Holmes.
That's entirely what this is.
You shouldn't raise at a $1B valuation without a single product in the market.
Google fired a shot across their bow by coming out with an even better world model the very next day after they announced their raise.
"World models" are going to become commoditized anyway, just like image and video models [1]. The product is what matters, and as it stands, companies like World Labs and Decart are just fancy research labs without a revenue stream.
Without a product, this is probably going to be Character.ai all over again.
[1] Stable Diffusion, Flux, Hunyuan, LTX-1, ...