Top World Model Researchers in AI (2026)

Professor of EECS, UC Berkeley · Amazon Scholar / Head of LLM efforts in AGI org, Amazon

PhD · Stanford University — Andrew Ng

Berkeley deep-RL/robot-learning leader; co-founded Covariant; now heads Amazon's LLM/AGI robotics efforts

Pioneer of deep RL and imitation learning. Drove UniSim and Large World Model, and recent generalist robot world models (DreamDojo) trained on tens of thousands of hours of human video.

Associate Professor of Computer Science & EE, Stanford University · Co-Founder, Physical Intelligence

PhD · UC Berkeley — Sergey Levine and Pieter Abbeel

Co-creator of MAML meta-learning; co-founder of Physical Intelligence (robot foundation models)

Pioneer of meta-learning and visual foresight for robots. Co-author of Physical Intelligence's pi-0.6 (RL self-improvement for VLAs) and Ctrl-World / VLAW, which use video world models to evaluate and improve robot policies.

Co-founder & CEO, Sakana AI

PhD · University of Tokyo

Author of the seminal 'World Models' paper; co-founder/CEO of Sakana AI (nature-inspired foundation models)

Co-author of the foundational 2018 "World Models" paper that introduced the modern framing of learning compact predictive models of an environment for control. Now at Sakana AI.

Co-founder, Embo

PhD · University of Toronto — Advised by Jimmy Ba (Vector Institute / U. Toronto)

Creator of the Dreamer line of world-model agents (DreamerV3, Dreamer 4); RL by imagination

Creator of the Dreamer line of model-based RL. Dreamer 4 (2025) was the first agent to obtain diamonds in Minecraft purely from offline data with no environment interaction — a landmark for training agents inside imagined world models.

Associate Professor of EECS (tenured), MIT · Distinguished Scientist (part-time), Google DeepMind

PhD · The Chinese University of Hong Kong — Xiaoou Tang

Lead author of ResNet (deep residual learning); also Faster R-CNN, Mask R-CNN, MAE

Author of ResNet and Masked Autoencoders (MAE), among the most-cited works in deep learning. Recent generative work (JiT, improved Mean Flows) pushes diffusion-style models toward single-step, tokenizer-free generation — core infrastructure for video world models.

Founder & Executive Chairman, AMI Labs (Advanced Machine Intelligence) · Professor, New York University

PhD · Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Sorbonne / UPMC), Paris — PhD on backpropagation; later postdoc with Geoffrey Hinton at U. Toronto

Turing Award pioneer of CNNs/deep learning; champion of JEPA world-model architectures

Turing Award winner and originator of the Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA), the leading self-supervised alternative to autoregressive world models. His team's 2025–26 work extended JEPA into a deployable family — VL-JEPA, Causal-JEPA, and latent-action world models learned from in-the-wild video.

Co-founder & CEO, World Labs · Sequoia Professor of Computer Science; Co-Director, HAI, Stanford University

PhD · California Institute of Technology (Caltech) — Advised by Pietro Perona (and Christof Koch)

Created ImageNet; co-founder/CEO of World Labs building spatial-intelligence world models (Marble)

Creator of ImageNet and the intellectual leader of "spatial intelligence." Co-founded World Labs, which raised ~$1B and shipped Marble (persistent 3D worlds from text/image), the World API, and real-time interactive world models running on a single GPU.

Co-founder & CEO, Recursive (Recursive Superintelligence) · Professor of Artificial Intelligence, University College London

PhD · University College London (UCL) — Advised by Sebastian Riedel

Led Genie foundation world models & Open-Endedness at DeepMind; UCL AI professor; co-founder of Recursive

Leads interactive world-model research at Google DeepMind, including the Genie line of foundation world models that generate playable, controllable environments from a single prompt.

Research Scientist, Meta FAIR

PhD · McGill University — Mila (Quebec AI Institute)

Lead author of I-JEPA, V-JEPA and V-JEPA 2 self-supervised world-model architectures at Meta FAIR

Lead author of I-JEPA and V-JEPA, the image and video instantiations of LeCun's self-supervised world-model paradigm at Meta AI.

Research Scientist & Manager, Meta (FAIR)

PhD · Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS) Paris — WILLOW team; advisors Ivan Laptev, Jean Ponce, Cordelia Schmid, Josef Sivic

FAIR Paris research lead; co-author of fastText, DINO/DINOv2, and I-JEPA self-supervised models

Research Scientist, Meta Superintelligence Labs

PhD · UC Berkeley — Alyosha Efros (BAIR)

Co-created OpenAI's Sora; invented InstructPix2Pix; now builds multimodal/world models at Meta

Co-led OpenAI's Sora and now works on Google DeepMind's Veo — the frontier of large-scale video generation as a world simulator.

Co-founder & CEO, Elorian

PhD · University of Edinburgh

Co-founder/CEO of Elorian (visual reasoning, world models); ex-DeepMind Gemini data-area lead

Professor (EECS), UC Berkeley

PhD · MIT — MIT, advised by Eric Grimson

UC Berkeley EECS professor, co-founder/co-lead of BAIR; leading computer vision and deep learning researcher.

Research Scientist, Meta

PhD · Stanford University — Fei-Fei Li

Stanford PhD on video generation (W.A.L.T) and embodied AI; now world/simulation models at Meta

PhD Candidate (final-year), UC San Diego

Creator of TD-MPC / TD-MPC2 scalable world models for continuous control RL

Author of TD-MPC2 and Newt, scalable model-based RL world models for continuous control across hundreds of tasks.

Research Scientist, Google DeepMind · Assistant Professor, Columbia University

PhD · University of Washington — GRAIL / UW Graphics (advisors: Steve Seitz, Brian Curless, Rick Szeliski)

Google DeepMind research scientist & Columbia professor; generative video/3D and world-model research.

Researcher, General Intuition

PhD · University of Cambridge — Machine Intelligence Lab (advisor: Roberto Cipolla)

Led GAIA generative world models for autonomous driving at Wayve; now building world models at General Intuition.

Founder & CEO, Morpheus

PhD · Cornell University — advised by Serge Belongie

Created AdaIN (now used across diffusion models); founder of Morpheus, real-time interactive video world models

Associate Professor of EECS, MIT

PhD · MIT — Ted Adelson (Brain & Cognitive Sciences)

Co-creator of pix2pix and CycleGAN; Platonic Representation Hypothesis on shared world representations

Co-Founder, World Labs · Adjunct Assistant Professor, University of Michigan

PhD · Stanford University — Stanford Vision Lab (advisor: Fei-Fei Li)

Co-founder of World Labs; pioneered real-time neural style transfer and visual reasoning.

Co-founder of World Labs and a leader in 3D generation and visual reasoning; co-author of widely used vision and neural-style-transfer methods.

Member of Technical Staff (Research Scientist), OpenAI

PhD · RWTH Aachen University — Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (advisor: Erich Grädel)

Co-author of 'Attention Is All You Need' (Transformer); research lead on OpenAI's o1 reasoning models.

Co-founder & CEO, Wayve

PhD · University of Cambridge — Machine Intelligence Laboratory, advised by Roberto Cipolla

Co-founder and CEO of Wayve; pioneer of end-to-end deep learning ('AV2.0') for autonomous driving.

CEO of Wayve and architect of GAIA, generative driving world models for autonomous vehicles.

Co-founder, World Labs

PhD · University of Tübingen — Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems / Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Tübingen

Co-founder of World Labs; computer vision/graphics researcher in 3D/4D reconstruction and neural rendering (Pulsar).

Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Columbia University

PhD · MIT — Advised by Antonio Torralba and Russ Tedrake (MIT CSAIL)

Structured/particle-based learned world models for robot manipulation of deformable objects and fluids.

Research Scientist, Google DeepMind

PhD · UC Berkeley — Pieter Abbeel

Creator of RingAttention and the Large World Model (LWM); 1M-context multimodal video-language world model

Co-Founder, World Labs

PhD · UC Berkeley — Berkeley graphics/imaging (advisor: Ren Ng)

Lead author of NeRF (Neural Radiance Fields); co-founder of World Labs.

Inventor of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), the technique that launched modern neural 3D reconstruction; co-founder of World Labs.

Director, Research Scientist, Meta Superintelligence Labs (TBD Labs)

PhD · Carnegie Mellon University — Robotics Institute (advised by Martial Hebert / Abhinav Gupta)

Self-supervised vision researcher; co-author of I-JEPA, DINO, and Movie Gen / Emu Video generation

Research Scientist, Open-Endedness Team, Google DeepMind · Honorary Lecturer, University College London

PhD · University of Oxford — Stephen Roberts (Machine Learning Research Group)

Co-lead of DeepMind's Genie world models (Genie 1/2/3) for generative interactive environments

Genie lead at Google DeepMind, driving interactive foundation world models that generate controllable environments.

Member of Technical Staff, Project Prometheus

PhD · Queen Mary University of London — Theoretical physics (string theory) PhD; later RL self-taught

Co-author of DreamerV3 world-model RL agent and the Memory Maze long-term-memory benchmark

Former Head of Sora (departed April 2026), OpenAI

PhD · UC Berkeley — Alyosha Efros (BAIR)

Invented the Diffusion Transformer (DiT); co-creator/Head of OpenAI's Sora

Co-creator of the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architecture that underpins Sora and most modern video-generation models; now at OpenAI.

VP of World Models, AMI Labs

PhD · University of Wisconsin-Madison — Robert Nowak (Electrical Engineering)

Co-creator of I-JEPA/V-JEPA self-supervised world models; now VP World Models at LeCun's AMI Labs

Director of Research, Creative Vision, Snap Research

PhD · University of Trento

Director of Research at Snap; video generation pioneer (MoCoGAN, First Order Motion Model, Snap Video)

Co-Founder & CEO, Runway

Co-founder & CEO of Runway; generative video moving into general world models (GWM-1)

CEO of Runway, which ships commercial generative world models for video (Gen-series, GWM-1) used widely in film and media production.

Research Scientist, Meta (FAIR) · Adjunct Professor (Mila founding member), Universite de Montreal / Mila

PhD · Universite de Montreal — Yoshua Bengio (Mila)

Pioneer of denoising autoencoders & denoising score matching; co-author of I-JEPA self-supervised models

Assistant Professor of Computer Science (courtesy in Psychology), Stanford University

PhD · MIT — William T. Freeman and Joshua B. Tenenbaum

Physical scene understanding; physics-engine-integrated and neuro-symbolic visual reasoning

Leads physics-based and 3D world-model research at Stanford, including multi-scale 3D world generation (WonderZoom) and intuitive-physics models.

Co-founder & CEO, Genesis AI

PhD · Carnegie Mellon University — Robotics Institute, advised by Katerina Fragkiadaki

Co-founder/CEO of Genesis AI; creator of RoboGen and the Genesis generative physics engine for robotics.

Co-founder & Chief Science Officer, AMI Labs · Assistant Professor of Computer Science (on leave), New York University

PhD · UC San Diego — Zhuowen Tu

Co-creator of Diffusion Transformers (DiT) and ConvNeXt; co-founder/CSO of AMI Labs (JEPA world models)

Co-creator of V-JEPA and a leader in generative representation learning; recent work on flow-map distillation and representation autoencoders set new image-generation SOTA.

Assistant Professor of Computer Science, NYU Courant · Staff Research Scientist, Google DeepMind

PhD · UC Berkeley — Pieter Abbeel

Generative world models / real-world simulators (UniSim) for embodied agents

Pioneer of treating video generation as a universal world model and simulator; co-author on Gemini Robotics and Veo-based policy evaluation at Google DeepMind.

Co-Founder, General Intuition

PhD · University of Geneva — François Fleuret's group

Led DIAMOND and IRIS diffusion/transformer world models; co-founder of General Intuition

First author of DIAMOND (NeurIPS 2024), a diffusion world model achieving human-level Atari play.

Incoming Assistant Professor, Imperial College London · Research Scientist, Meta FAIR

PhD · Tel Aviv University / UC Berkeley — Advised by Amir Globerson and Trevor Darrell

Navigation World Models (CVPR 2025 Best Paper Honorable Mention); self-supervised visual world modeling

First author of Navigation World Models (CVPR 2025 Honorable Mention), a billion-parameter conditional diffusion transformer for visual navigation prediction.

Dickinson Family Assistant Professor, Duke University

PhD · Columbia University — Hod Lipson's Creative Machines Lab

Dickinson Family Asst. Prof. at Duke; directs General Robotics Lab; self-modeling robots & automated scientific discovery

First author of Diffusion Forcing (NeurIPS 2024), a training paradigm unifying video prediction and world models; recent work on large video planners for robot control.

Assistant Professor, Harvard University · Senior Research Scientist, Google DeepMind

PhD · Massachusetts Institute of Technology — Leslie Kaelbling, Tomas Lozano-Perez & Joshua Tenenbaum (MIT EECS)

Harvard SEAS Asst. Prof & Kempner Investigator; compositional/energy-based generative world models

Pioneer of composable diffusion and energy-based world models; frequent collaborator on video-model-as-simulator robotics work.

Research Engineer, Google DeepMind

DeepMind researcher; technical lead/contributor on the Genie 2 and Genie 3 foundation world models

Known for Genie 2 (2024). Technical lead on Genie interactive world models

Co-Founder, Genesis AI · PhD Candidate, MIT CSAIL

PhD · Massachusetts Institute of Technology — Daniela Rus (MIT CSAIL Distributed Robotics Lab)

MIT CSAIL roboticist; co-founder of Genesis AI universal robotics foundation model startup

Co-lead on the Genesis physics engine for embodied AI, reported 10–80× faster than prior simulators.

Video & Inference Lead, HPC-AI Tech

Founder/lead of Open-Sora, the first open-source Sora-like video generation model

Known for Open-Sora (2024). Lead on Open-Sora, open-source video generation framework

PhD Student, New York University

Lead author of DINO-WM world models for zero-shot planning on pre-trained visual features

Known for Navigation World Models (CVPR 2025). Co-author on navigation world models with Amir Bar