At Rise of AI 2025 in Berlin, Pascale Fung, Director at Meta FAIR, argues that AI is entering a new era defined by autonomous, embodied agents rather than simple assistants. She traces Meta FAIR's history, from PyTorch and the first Llama model, developed in Paris, to the No Language Left Behind project covering more than 300 languages, and explains why FAIR insists on open-sourcing its models: only open science lets the community independently verify claims such as which model performs best. Fung calls 2025 the "year zero" of AI agents, distinguishing them from earlier assistants by their ability to carry out long, multi-step tasks autonomously. She then focuses on embodied agents, in wearable devices, avatars and robots, that must model both the physical world and a user's mental state, and warns that hallucination is far more dangerous once agents act physically rather than only answering text. FAIR is exploring JEPA-based world-modeling architectures to build agents that are objective-driven rather than merely trained to predict the next token. She closes with a video scenario of a future dinner party run with wearable and robotic assistance, illustrating how embodied agents could remove physical and mental chores from daily life.
Key takeaways
- Fung calls 2025 the "year zero" of AI agents because they can complete multi-step tasks that assistants could not.
- Meta open-sources FAIR's research, including Llama and PyTorch, so scientific claims can be independently verified.
- Embodied agents in wearables must model both the physical world and the user's mental state to act safely.
- Fung warns hallucination is far more dangerous in embodied or robotic agents than in text-based generative models.
- FAIR is exploring JEPA-style world-modeling architectures to build objective-driven AI beyond next-token prediction.
Detailed notes
Open science at Meta FAIR
Fung recounts FAIR's ten-year history: co-founded in 2013 with Yann LeCun, it created PyTorch in 2016, and the first Llama model was developed by European researchers in FAIR Paris before Llama was spun off into the GenAI team. She argues FAIR must keep releasing open models because AI is a multistakeholder, cross-disciplinary technology built on contributions from many scientific fields, and because open source is the only way the community can verify performance claims; she cites her own 2023 benchmarking paper that tested ChatGPT on 23 standard NLP tasks. She also highlights No Language Left Behind, a FAIR project covering more than 300 languages, developed with UNESCO and used by developers in the Global South, now being extended toward 1,000 languages with very-few-sample translation methods.
From AI assistants to autonomous agents
Fung distinguishes today's AI agents from earlier call-center and smartphone assistants such as Siri, which performed single, simple actions like voice search. She calls 2025 the "year zero" of AI agents because they can now carry out tasks requiring far more steps than a human would need, such as scheduling a meeting by researching purpose, timing and contacts. She notes startups can build purpose-built agents by fine-tuning open Llama models, and mentions GAIA as a benchmark used to compare web or digital agents' tool-use capabilities.
Embodied agents and the limits of generative models
Fung argues generative models are optimized to predict the next token or pixel, not to reason or plan, which is why they often fail to follow instructions precisely and why enterprises need fine-tuning. FAIR is researching alternative, objective-driven architectures, including JEPA-based world models, to move beyond this limitation. She describes embodied agents in 2D/3D avatars and wearable devices such as Meta's Orion glasses, which see and hear what the user does and must model both the physical world (laws of physics, what is dangerous) and the user's mental state, for example a math-tutor agent that hints rather than gives answers. She stresses that hallucination, tolerable in a text answer, becomes dangerous once an agent controls a robot's arm or tells a wearer to jump, and says FAIR is building safety and guardrails into these architectures from the start rather than filtering output afterward.
Robotic agents and a future dinner party
Fung describes the merging of robotics and AI into robotic agents that combine a physical body with an AI "brain," and says FAIR has published first results on robotic action planning using JEPA-based architectures. She illustrates the vision with a video scenario: planning a dinner party with a conversational agent that suggests a guest list and menu, an Orion-glasses agent that helps with grocery shopping and hints during cooking, and a robot such as Spot serving drinks and clearing the table afterward, freeing the host to spend time with guests instead of doing chores.
Q&A highlights
Asked when she expects to host a dinner party with a robotic dog, Fung says two to three years, maybe five, depending on what such a robot can do. Asked about her meeting with Pope Francis, she says he gave a speech on using technology to benefit humankind, particularly in healthcare, and said it would be selfish to want the benefits of medical AI trained on others' data while refusing to share one's own data for research.
Quotes
2025, I actually call it the year zero of AI agents.
Pascale Fung
AI agents are more autonomous than assistants.
Pascale Fung
Technology is not there to prevent humanity from progressing. Technology is here to enable us to progress further.
Pascale Fung
Questions answered in this talk
What does Pascale Fung mean by the "year zero of AI agents"?
According to Pascale Fung at Rise of AI 2025, 2025 is the "year zero" of AI agents because, unlike earlier assistants that performed single simple actions, these agents can autonomously complete tasks requiring far more steps, such as researching and scheduling a meeting.
What are embodied AI agents?
According to Pascale Fung at Rise of AI 2025, embodied AI agents are agents built into avatars, wearable devices or robots that see and hear what the user experiences and must model both the physical world and the user's mental state to act helpfully and safely.
Why does Meta FAIR open-source its AI models?
According to Pascale Fung at Rise of AI 2025, Meta FAIR open-sources models like Llama and PyTorch so the scientific community can independently verify performance claims and so AI, as a multistakeholder technology, can be co-developed with society.