The Download: DeepSeek’s latest AI breakthrough, and the race to build world models

DeepSeek released V4, a new AI model that can process longer text more efficiently and matches the performance of leading competitors from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google while remaining open source. Researchers are increasingly focused on developing world models (AI systems that understand and can interact with the physical world, not just digital tasks) to overcome limitations of current language models and enable advances in robotics and physical tasks like laundry folding or navigation.