The Institute of Foundation Models (IFM), the Abu Dhabi-based AI research lab of Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), has released PAN 2, an open general-purpose world model that simulates physical-world scenarios.
Users can provide a starting scene and describe an action in writing. PAN 2 then generates a video showing what could happen next, using its understanding of physics, time and space. IFM describes this as “simulative reasoning,” allowing people and AI agents to test actions before carrying them out in the real world.
The model has been released with its weights, full training code and inference code under the Apache 2.0 licence. Its two-stage system first produces a time-stamped prediction of events and camera movement, before a video diffusion model generates the result from real-world footage selected for its physical dynamics.
According to IFM, PAN 2 ranks third overall on the Physics-IQ Verified leaderboard and first among open-weight models. It also completed more full plans than the other models tested in multi-step planning.
Potential applications include robotics, autonomous vehicles, urban planning, emergency response and surgical simulation. IFM said long-term consistency across generated scenarios remains an unresolved challenge. PAN 2 is available through the institute’s website.
Source: Middle East AI News
