This is the big takeaway. Building world models is not just one possible path to AGI; it might be the only path.

We now have a formal proof that there is no model-free shortcut to general intelligence. An agent simply cannot be flexible, general, and capable of long-horizon planning without having an internal, predictive model of how its world works.

This means that to build truly general agents, we can not avoid the hard problem. We must build systems that learn to simulate and understand their world—systems that do "world model induction."