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Sun: Moonlake splits world modeling into multimodal reasoning and Reverie rendering

Fan-yun Sun · Moonlake: Interactive, Multimodal World Models — with Chris Manning and Fan-yun Sun · Apr 2, 2026 · at 28:25

Fan-yun Sun, co-founder of Moonlake, explains the architecture behind Moonlake's interactive world models.

0:00 / 0:49exact quote · 49.6s
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“Within our world modeling framework, we think there are two models that we train, right? Like there's the multimodal reasoning model that we just talked about that essentially handles Mainly the causality, the persistency, and logic, determinism, determinism of the world. And then Reverie is our bet on saying, okay, like, while all those models can take care of all these things that we just talked about, its limitations compared to existing, say, video models is that it doesn't have as high of a pixel fidelity right off the gate, right? And reverie is to say, hey, we can actually take whatever persistent representation that we generate with our multimodal reasoning model and learn to restyle it into photorealistic styles or arbitrary styles you want.”

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