DeepMind: Intelligentsia are models of the world! There are no model-free shortcuts to AGI!

DeepMind scientist Jon Richens' ICML 2025 paper reveals that any intelligence that can generalize to a multi-step goal task must have learned a predictive model of the environment, i.e., "intelligence is a model of the world"; the study proves that: intelligence strategies contain all the information needed to accurately simulate the environment and can be extracted from strategies by the It is demonstrated that intelligent body strategies contain all the information needed to accurately model the environment, and that the world model can be extracted from the strategies by algorithms, which coincides with Ilya's prediction in 2023; it is shown that there are no model-free shortcuts to achieving AGI, and that more accurate world models have to be learned to improve performance and generalization, but that "short-sighted intelligences" do not need to learn the world model as they focus on the immediate payoffs.