While global tech giants race to build AI systems that generate increasingly realistic video clips, researchers in Abu Dhabi have built something different - a model that does that while learning how the world behaves over time.

Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) has unveiled PAN, a world-model AI capable of remembering past events, predicting future states, and responding to multi-step instructions with human-like consistency.

Released by MBZUAI's Institute of Foundation Models, PAN maintains continuity across long sequences, allowing it to follow directions such as“turn left after the bridge” or“place the can on the table, then step back,” while preserving the spatial layout and logical flow of the scene.

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Current systems like OpenAI's Sora and Google's Veo often produce visually rich clips but lose track of objects or scene structure over time - a gap PAN is designed to close.

“Instead of simply generating video, PAN understands what's happening in a scene and predicts what should happen next,” researchers involved in the project explained.

PAN achieves this by separating the task into two stages. First, it forms an internal representation of the environment - recognising objects, motion, and relationships over time. It then translates that understanding into video, updating it step-by-step as instructions evolve. This approach allows the system to maintain stability and realism over longer periods.

The launch arrives as simulation technology becomes increasingly important for robotics, autonomous systems, and industrial planning. PAN's ability to track objects across time and anticipate outcomes makes it a definite tool for testing situations that would be too risky, expensive, or impractical to recreate in the physical world.

Developed by MBZUAI teams in Abu Dhabi, Paris, and Silicon Valley, PAN is part of multiple models being brought out from the capital in a feat of stopping reliance on imported technology. The model and its technical documentation are publicly available at panworld, putting the UAE among a small group of countries and institutions producing world-model AI for open research use.

As global companies now push toward safer autonomous systems and more reliable planning, PAN offers an alternative to models focused purely on visual quality. Instead of showing short clips, it provides a structured understanding of how actions influence future outcomes – a capability that researchers say brings AI a step closer to genuine reasoning and understanding of the physical world.

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