Nature Foundation Models: A Hierarchical Framework for Learning Worlds, Embodiment, and Scientific Intelligence
We propose Nature Foundation Models (NFM), a research program for systems that learn representations, dynamics, causal structure, and mechanisms directly from interaction with the natural world. NFM organizes scientific intelligence as a hierarchy—NFM-Worlds, NFM-Robotics, Atlas, and Atlas-GS—with a shared state–action–dynamics abstraction and a seven-stage developmental pipeline from world representation to adaptive scientific reasoning. The central thesis is that scientific reasoning should emerge from increasingly sophisticated interactions with learned world models rather than from an independent symbolic module.