New Delhi, June 25 -- Computer scientist Louis Castricato was in his eighth year studying large language models - the artificial intelligence technology behind chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude - when he started to feel like he was hitting a dead end.

"We basically have passed the point of doing real fundamental LLM research," Castricato said. "Now it's just applications."

The researcher quit his doctoral studies at Brown University and started a new company, called Overworld. Its ambition is in its name: AI that can understand and navigate a world, not just words.

There's still plenty of money to be made from AI chatbots - investors are counting on it as they commit trillions of dollars to leading developers like Anthropic and OpenAI. ...