Dallas-Based Worlds' Pioneering ‘Large World Model’ Platform Could Be the Next Leap Forward in AI's Evolution
One day in late 2023, CEO Dave Copps and President Chris Rohde of Worlds were sitting in the company's conference room when CTO Ross Bates and Worlds' lead artificial-intelligence developer came in to show them a newly created technology for AI.
What they saw was a breakthrough—the first-of-its-kind in AI for the physical world, Copps says.
Worlds' technology, called WorldsNQ—or "infinite intelligence"—is engineered to continuously observe and learn from physical environments using a company's existing cameras and sensors, Worlds says. The platform, which adapts across sectors, from factory floors to energy sites, was built for industries where operations are always in motion.
"When we started Worlds, we created a mission...to build software that could see and sense the world like people do," Copps said earlier this year. After keeping the discovery under wraps for months, WorldsNQ emerged in February as a platform that observes, learns, and adapts independently in real time.
WorldsNQ intelligence never goes static, Copps says, solving a long-standing industry problem. Unlike traditional AI systems that rely on manual updates, WorldsNQ autonomously updates models of real-world operations in real time using a company's own data, requiring no human oversight—a key differentiator in the industry.
"[Seeing it in action] was the first time I ever got goosebumps when I saw technology," said Copps, who co-founded Worlds with Rohde and Bates in 2022 and has had several successful startup exits. "This was what I call a 5G moment. 5G moments in startups are where you see something, and all you can do is look in each other's eyes and just say, 'Go, go, go, go, go!'"
And, "go" they did. The culmination of their under-the-radar efforts led to a formal unveiling in mid-February, when the company launched WorldsNQ, pioneering the Large World Model (LWM) concept in AI.
Since then, Worlds has been quietly advancing its technology and racking up achievements. The company was mentioned by Gartner as a Tech Innovator in Specialized AI Services and highlighted in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Indoor Location Services. This month, Worlds secured a new patent after ranking in the top five of the Tech Titans Fast Tech 50 with 312% growth in September and joined Microsoft's Pegasus Program. The achievements, coupled with new partnerships with Accenture and Chevron, signal that Worlds is ready to emerge from its under-the-radar status.
'Months become minutes'
Spatial AI tech is the animating force behind Dallas-based Worlds, which builds live, 4D digital twins of real-world operations to unlock value for large industrial companies like Chevron and TimkenSteel.
In contrast to today's Large Language Models (LLM) and other generative AI tools—which enable AI to read and understand text, images, and sounds—Worlds says its LWM concept is engineered to work with data captured by cameras and IoT sensors, feeding information to the model to understand the real world in motion.
Worlds says its advancement means that, instead of retaining teams of multiple AI trainers to manually refine and maintain their AI models over many months, companies can use the unsupervised new platform and reduce their costs, saving time and resources in the process.
WorldsNQ automates and "radically" accelerates AI learning by 100 to 1,000 times, the company says, and can be used with an organization's existing cameras and sensors.
Its closed-loop system continuously learns from its environment, Worlds adds, remaining relevant as conditions change and adapting at a pace and scale that's ideal for driving innovation.
Current AI systems, which typically focus on predetermined objects or concepts, can't train on everything, Copps says. "They ask, 'What are the three or four things you want to know about cars, trucks, and people?' " he said. "And they train on cars, trucks, and people—they draw boxes of cars, trucks, and people. But ... when you say, 'No, I also need to know about dogs,' they have to start over. Now they've got to go through all the videos and learn.
"But, NQ creates an index of everything that's always there," he said. "So when you decide that dogs are important, boom!—it's already indexed. Put in your models and go. So it's a radically faster solution. Months become minutes."
Partnerships with Accenture and Chevron
The unveiling of WorldsNQ eight months ago came at Capital Factory's Future of AI Salon event sponsored by JPMorgan Chase & Co.
The packed, invitation-only gathering at Dallas' Old Parkland office complex included an appearance by representatives of professional-services firm Accenture, which has begun a new business partnership with Worlds that aims to kick-start AI services for its clients. Energy giant Chevron also has entered into a new partnership with it, Worlds said.
According to Accenture's Michael Klein, Worlds' LWM platform will be able to create superior insights and "actionable outcomes" for Accenture clients, in part because of its speed and adaptability to changing physical environments. Klein said the partnership would help Worlds "operate at a global scalable level" and support clients in transforming their operations with the technology. Already, Klein's colleague Paul Siwek added, there's been "a lot of buzz" among clients for WorldsNQ's ability to scale and save them money.
Following the new platform's formal launch presentation, Copps told Dallas Innovates that the potential for WorldsNQ is staggering. "I mean, what large industrial company doesn't need this?" he said. "We've developed a way for people to measure the real world, so any company that's trying to improve their real-world environment could use this platform to do that."
Targeting 'every company in the world'
In addition to Accenture, Copps said at the time, WorldsNQ will be made available through other partners, including federal government contractor CACI International and business/tech consulting firm Slalom. "Then there's a couple of others that I can't mention yet, but they're names you would recognize," he said, adding that "we expect to have all the Big 4" accounting and professional services firms.
WorldsNQ is "what we're doing 100%," he went on. "We're going to focus on building a broad capability that we can take to every company in the world." Worlds' approach is to take exponential technologies like AI and "put them underneath everything," Copps said, with the goal of making operations easier, faster, and more productive for companies.
"To keep up with the pace of the world and what's happening right now, we have to think differently," Copps said. "We have to innovate differently."
And that meeting in the conference room last year? Copps said it was the result of Worlds' cumulative experience—and of thinking, there's got to be a better way to do AI.
"We got the guys together and they came in [that] day with a very, very early version and showed it to us, but even that early version was just fantastic," he said. "It took them a while, and it was not easy. And you combine that with all the things we've been building the last three and a half years, and you put all that together and it creates WorldsNQ.
"NQ's not this one thing that we just built. We're taking everything we've built and putting it all together in one platform."
