Jim Fan: 2026 Is the Year of Large World Models — DreamZero Open-Sourced for Physical AI

Jim Fan / NVIDIA·medium signal

NVIDIA's Jim Fan declared 2026 'the year Large World Models lay real foundations for robotics.' His team open-sourced DreamZero — weights, code, post-training dataset, eval set, and whitepaper — built on NVIDIA Cosmos. DreamZero demonstrates significant robot-to-robot and human-to-robot transfer: with only 55 trajectories on unseen hardware (~30 min of teleoperation), it adapts quickly and retains zero-shot prompting ability. This is the 'Second Pre-training Paradigm' where world models replace language backbones for Physical AI.