Konnichiwa. Bonjour. Hello everyone.
It is a great honor to address you
today, and I'm truly sorry I cannot be
there in person. What we're launching in
Tokyo on July 16th is exactly the kind
of bold, forward-looking initiative that
the world needs at this precise moment
in the history of AI. My name is Yann
LeCun. I am a professor at New York
University, uh chairman and co-founder
of Advanced Machine Intelligence, which
we call AMI, and a recipient of the
Turing Award. Prior to AMI, I spent 12
years at Meta, where I founded FAIR,
Meta's Fundamental AI Research Lab, and
served as Chief AI Scientist.
For many years, I've been fortunate to
contribute to the development of modern
AI and deep learning. Early in my
career, I've been inspired by the
foundational work of Professor Amari and
Fukushima on neural networks from the
1970s and 1980s. Today, my focus is on
helping build the next generation of AI
systems capable of understanding and
interacting with the real world.
We are at a turning point. For the last
5 years,
artificial intelligence through
generative models has been largely a
disembodied technology.
It's extraordinarily good at processing
human language, computer code, and
mathematics, but fundamentally unable to
apprehend the physical world.
The next frontier in AI will change
that. It's about building AI systems
that can perceive,
reason about, and act in any
environment. Systems that understand
causality, physical reality, and the
constraints of the real world.
This is physical AI, and it may well be
the most important scientific and
engineering challenge of our generation.
Getting there requires new
architectures, systems that learn not
just from text and other sequences of
symbols, but from real-world sensor data
that is continuous, high-dimensional,
and noisy.
Like video, for example. AI models that
build an internal representation of the
world and are capable of predicting the
consequences of their action will be a
centerpiece of that new revolution.
At Emmy, this is precisely the mission
that we are pursuing, building agent AI
systems around the concept of world
models. The world model with world model
AI systems can predict the evolution of
their environment, predict the
consequences of their own actions,
and plan a sequence of actions to
accomplish a particular task.
This will enable countless new
applications in industry, such as
manufacturing.
It will also enable a new generation of
autonomous robots capable of operating
in complex unstructured environment.
These robots will go beyond scripted
recipes and will be able to apprehend
new situations and accomplish new tasks
without prior training. More generally,
physical AI systems will help operate
infrastructure, manage grids in real
time, and accelerate the transition to
sustainable resilient energy at scale.
These are not distant promises.
The foundational work is happening now,
and Japan is uniquely positioned
to be at the center of it.
Decades of mastery in precision
manufacturing, industrial robotics, and
engineering excellence have given Japan
exactly the foundation that physical AI
demands. The factory floor, the
automated plant,
the industrial environment, these are
training grounds for the next generation
of intelligent systems. In the
application of physical AI, Japan does
not need to catch up. Japan needs to
lead, but no country does this alone.
The challenges ahead require
genuine international collaboration
between researchers, between industries,
between governments.
What you are initiating today is a
signal to the world that Japan is ready
to be a full partner in shaping this
future. I'm deeply excited about what we
can build together, and I look forward
to working alongside Japan's scientists
and engineers and policymakers
to create AI systems that don't just
understand the world, but can truly act
in it, improve it, and help us all
thrive within it. Thank you. Merci
beaucoup. Arigato gozaimasu.