Daniel Zhang, Caroline Meinhardt, Jiajun Wu, and Russell Wald | The World Model and Spatial Intelligence Era: Governing AI Beyond Language | Stanford HAI
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eventSeminar

Daniel Zhang, Caroline Meinhardt, Jiajun Wu, and Russell Wald | The World Model and Spatial Intelligence Era: Governing AI Beyond Language

Status
Past
Date
Wednesday, September 30, 2026 3:00 PM - 4:15 PM
Location
353 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA, 94305 | Room 119
Topics
Regulation, Policy, Governance
Attend In-PersonAttend Virtually

As AI moves beyond language into systems that can perceive, understand, and act in the physical world, a new frontier is emerging: world models—AI systems that build and maintain working representations of real environments to predict how they change in response to action.

Building upon a recent Stanford HAI Policy Brief, this seminar will examine how world models could transform infrastructure planning, crisis response, scientific experimentation, and embodied AI, while raising distinct governance challenges that today's language-focused AI policy fails to address.

Speakers
Daniel Zhang
Chief of Staff
headshot
Caroline Meinhardt
Senior Policy Research Manager, Stanford HAI
Jiajun Wu
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Russell Wald headshot
Russell Wald
Executive Director, Stanford HAI
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Event Contact
Stanford HAI
stanford-hai@stanford.edu
Related
  • The World Model and Spatial Intelligence Era: Governing AI Beyond Language
    Daniel Zhang, Russell Wald, Ehsan Adeli, Elena Cryst, Daniel E. Ho, Caroline Meinhardt, Jiajun Wu, Amy Zegart, Fei-Fei Li
    Quick ReadJul 27
    issue brief

    This brief highlights the emergence of world models and outlines a first-of-its-kind governance and policy agenda for the technology.

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