Anima Anandkumar: 'We have foundation models for language, not for physics'
Latent Space·medium signal
Latent Space published an August 26 interview with the Caltech Bren Professor, whose startup with Benedikt Jenik, both previously linked to the Bezos-backed Prometheus project, is building models of the physical world rather than another LLM. Her pitch is that the transformer-and-tokens recipe that produced language foundation models has no equivalent for physics, and her group is skipping transformers entirely. Coverage the same day noted the obvious counter: no published benchmark results yet, so this is a research bet rather than a demonstrated result.