Yann LeCun Debates JEPA vs GLP World Models — 'Current LLMs Lack Grounded Understanding of Physics, Space, and Time'

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At the Spring School AI For Impact 2026 in Morocco, Yann LeCun debated Eric Xing on two competing approaches to world models: LeCun's JEPA (Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture), which learns abstract representations and predicts without raw reconstruction, versus Xing's GLP, which keeps reconstruction as a validation mechanism. Both agreed current LLMs lack grounded understanding of physics, space, and social dynamics. LeCun's JEPA vision is backed by a $1 billion investment from Meta.