Montreal, September 11, 2026 – Worldmodeldata, a Cambridge-based startup building the world’s largest database of video game-generated training data for next-generation AI, has announced a strategic partnership with Mila, one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence research institutes. The collaboration will seek to advance the fundamental science behind next-generation AI by establishing whether a data scaling law exists for world models, AI that understands how the physical world works.
In January 2020, OpenAI’s landmark paper ‘Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models’ proved that LLMs follow a reliable pattern of improved performance as you scale up training data, compute and model size, making scaling a viable strategy for improving AI. This discovery laid the groundwork for record-breaking, industry-wide investment and growth.
No equivalent, universally established data scaling law exists for world models today. Building upon Worldmodeldata’s pioneering 2025 research highlighting video games as a vast, cost-effective source of action-conditioned training data, this strategic partnership with Mila will strive to answer these fundamental questions in embodied AI and world models. Commencing in September 2026, the research will be conducted over a 12-month period.
Under this joint initiative, Worldmodeldata will supply extensive data resources to empower Mila’s research teams as they investigate key open questions in AI scaling and domain transfer. To establish data scaling laws for world models, the researchers will measure how effectively embodied agents acquire capabilities in virtual environments and define precise metrics for transferring synthetic experience into real-world performance.
Rhea Loucas, Founder and CEO of Worldmodeldata, said: “The importance of scaling laws is not purely academic: they give the industry a predictable roadmap, showing that investment in larger and better datasets, and model as well as compute, can systematically improve model performance, thus justifying the billions of dollars being invested in the industry. If embodied AI systems can learn from unlimited virtual environments, transfer to real-world performance, and follow a similar scaling law, such a rule would be highly significant and could become a “GPT moment” for the world model industry. Demonstrating that relationship is therefore our next major milestone.”
Stéphane Létourneau, Executive Vice President at Mila, added: “Mila's mission is to push the fundamental science of AI forward for the benefit of all. Understanding how embodied AI systems learn from experience, and whether that learning transfers from virtual environments to real-world performance, is central to that mandate. Partnering with Worldmodeldata lets our researchers test one of the field's most consequential open questions with the scale and quality of data this research requires. We're proud to help build the evidence base the industry needs to move forward responsibly.”
About Worldmodeldata
Worldmodeldata delivers the most diverse, scalable, and high-quality training data to accelerate the next generation of AI - world models, embodied agents, and physical AI. We close an urgent data gap by turning modern video games into a source of rich, structured training data captured directly from the engine with humans in the loop.
About Mila
Founded by Professor Yoshua Bengio, Mila is one of the world’s leading AI research institutes, bringing together close to 2,000 researchers & professionals shaping the future of intelligence. A non-profit organization based in Montreal, Mila is recognized for its scientific contributions, global innovation partnerships, leadership in safe & responsible AI, and acceleration of AI venture creation. It was created through a unique partnership between Université de Montréal and McGill University to advance scientific breakthroughs for the benefit of all. Mila is supported by the Government of Canada, the Government of Quebec, and more than 150 industrial partners. For more information, visit mila.ai.
