Three scientists associated with the VinFuture Prize, including Professor Yann LeCun, Professor Fei-Fei Li and Professor Daniela Rus, are also on this year's list.
This is the fourth year TIME has announced this list. The common point in the research direction of the three scientists is to find ways to help AI not only process data but also have better understanding and interaction with the physical world.
Professor Yann LeCun: Towards a "world model
According to TIME, Professor Yann LeCun believes that continuing to expand large language models (LLM) is not enough for AI to reach human-level intelligence.
At AMI Labs - a company co-founded by Professor Yann LeCun after leaving Meta, the research group is developing "world models". This technology aims to help AI form understanding of the basic laws of the physical world, thereby predicting the results of different actions and choosing the appropriate way to act.
According to TIME, this approach can be applied in robotics, self-driving cars and medicine. In March 2026, AMI Labs raised more than $1 billion in the seed funding round.
Professor Fei-Fei Li: Developing "space intelligence
Professor Fei-Fei Li focuses on "spatial intelligence", helping AI overcome image recognition to understand three-dimensional structures, space and the physical world.
At World Labs - the company co-founded by Professor Fei-Fei Li in 2024, Marble products can create and explore 3D worlds from text, images or videos, while recreating depth and spatial composition. This technology can be used to create a simulation environment, serving robot training and evaluation before they operate in reality.
Professor Daniela Rus: Bringing AI into the real world
Professor Daniela Rus focuses on developing AI systems that can operate efficiently on a smaller scale, thereby reducing computing and resource requirements.
In 2020, Professor Daniela Rus and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed a microneural network inspired by the nervous system of worms, but capable of controlling cars on the right lane. This research direction later became one of the platforms for Liquid AI, a company founded in 2023.
With more than three decades of robot research, Professor Rus pursues embodied intelligence, bringing AI into robots and physical devices so that they can sense the environment, make decisions and act in the real world. Professor Rus's research is being applied in automobiles, logistics and automation.
In 2024, Professor Yann LeCun and Professor Fei-Fei Li, along with Professor Yoshua Bengio, Professor Geoffrey Hinton and Mr. Jen-Hsun Huang, received the VinFuture Main Prize for their contributions to promoting the development of in-depth learning.
