Towards AI that understands the Real World

About this session

Recent advances in AI have been driven by large-scale generative models with impressive capabilities in language, code, and digital tasks. Yet these systems still have a limited understanding of the physical world, human intentions, and real-world context. In this talk, Pascale Fung will discuss the next frontier of AI: world models. World models allow AI systems to learn abstract representations of the world from continuous multimodal data, enabling reasoning, planning, memory, and action beyond next-token prediction. Moving toward real-world AI agents requires modeling not only the physical world, but also the mental world - including intent, attention, goals, and social context. The future of AI will depend on systems that can understand, adapt, and collaborate in the real world, safely and reliably.

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Speakers

Pascale Fung

Co-founder and CRIO, AMI