🧠 LLMs Need Spatial Intelligence

Hey folks,

Remember being taught about the tortoise-and-the-hare fable? Turns out it's playing out in real-time with a $100 billion price tag. Anthropic's burning $6 billion on compute this year while OpenAI burns through $15 billion, and by 2028 that gap widens to $27B versus a staggering $111B. However, Anthropic hits profitability in 2027 with smart chip diversification (Amazon, Nvidia, Google) while OpenAI won't see black ink until after 2030 despite aiming for $100B in revenue. It's the ultimate startup dilemma: move fast and break your bank account, or play the long game with actual unit economics. One's building ChatGPT for everyone, the other's quietly selling API shovels during the gold rush.

Let's dive in..

🧠 LLMs Need Spatial Intelligence

🐝 The Buzz: Fei-Fei Li, the founder of World Labs, argues that LLMs have hit a fundamental ceiling and that they're "wordsmiths in the dark" lacking understanding of the physical world. Current LLMs can't answer basic spatial questions like object shape, the force required to move something, or whether objects will collide. This limitation explains why autonomous robots remain underdeveloped and immersive metaverse experiences haven't materialized. Her solution: building world models that unlock spatial intelligence by connecting perception, imagination, and action, to achieve the next major AI breakthrough toward AGI.

• "Wordsmiths in the dark" limitation: LLMs possess abstract knowledge but lack understanding of spatial laws and real-world physics, unable to reason about physical properties or spatial relationships.

• Why robots and metaverse haven't scaled: The absence of spatial intelligence has blocked progress in physical AI applications, from warehouse automation to immersive virtual environments requiring realistic physics.

• World models as the solution: Li's World Labs is building systems that combine visual perception, spatial reasoning, and action planning.

• Path to AGI: Spatial intelligence represents the missing piece connecting language understanding with physical world interaction, potentially marking an inflection point toward artificial general intelligence.

💡 Takeaway: Li's critique exposes the limits of scaling language-only models. While the industry pours billions into larger LLMs, she's arguing we've reached diminishing returns without spatial reasoning. World Labs' approach by building models that understand 3D space, physics, and embodied action could unlock robotics, autonomous systems, and AR/VR applications that current LLMs can't touch.

Together with Roku

Find your customers on Roku this Black Friday

As with any digital ad campaign, the important thing is to reach streaming audiences who will convert. To that end, Roku’s self-service Ads Manager stands ready with powerful segmentation and targeting options. After all, you know your customers, and we know our streaming audience.

Worried it’s too late to spin up new Black Friday creative? With Roku Ads Manager, you can easily import and augment existing creative assets from your social channels. We also have AI-assisted upscaling, so every ad is primed for CTV.

Once you’ve done this, then you can easily set up A/B tests to flight different creative variants and Black Friday offers. If you’re a Shopify brand, you can even run shoppable ads directly on-screen so viewers can purchase with just a click of their Roku remote.

Bonus: we’re gifting you $5K in ad credits when you spend your first $5K on Roku Ads Manager. Just sign up and use code GET5K. Terms apply.

Use code GET5K now

🗺️ Google Maps Launches AI Developer Tools with Gemini

🐝 The Buzz: Google released AI-driven tools powered by Gemini models that let developers create interactive map applications from text descriptions. The Builder Agent generates working code when you request features like "create a Street View tour of a city" or "list pet-friendly hotels," producing prototypes exportable to Firebase Studio.

• Styling Agent for brand consistency: Customize map appearances to match specific brand themes or color schemes, maintaining visual consistency across applications.

• MCP Server for third-party AI models: Model Context Protocol implementation lets developers ground their own AI assistants using Google Maps data, enabling location-based queries like "How far is the nearest grocery store?"

• Contextual View component: Low-code visual responses to location questions through lists, map views, or 3D displays without writing extensive code.

💡 Takeaway: Google Maps is positioning itself as AI infrastructure, not just a consumer app. By making Gemini-powered tools generate Maps applications from natural language and opening Maps data to third-party AI models through MCP, Google is building the location intelligence layer for the next generation of AI assistants.

📰 Like newsletters? Here are more our readers enjoy.

🐝 AI buzz bits

💰 AI-powered side hustles are generating real income despite the hype: faceless YouTube channels with AI avatars earning $3K-$12K monthly, AI theme pages for affiliate sales hitting $50K-$250K, and automated UGC videos for brands fetching $200-$500 per project.

🌏 Southeast Asia's digital economy hit $300 billion three years ahead of schedule, with Singapore securing 55% of regional AI investment ($1.31 billion) flowing to nearly 500 active AI startups.

⚠️ AI trading bots are surging in crypto markets, but experts warn they're not money printers. Despite promises of automated intelligent market participation, actual performance gaps between expectations and reality reveal genuine constraints that prevent these tools from being reliable wealth-generation machines.

🎤 Gen Alpha will send voice notes to their bosses instead of writing emails when they enter the workforce around 2030, according to LSE research predicting the keyboard practically obsolete by 2030.

🔥 AI productivity tools

For a full list of 1000+ AI tools, visit our Supertool Directory

🤘 Midweek meme