{
  "schemaVersion": "0.1.0",
  "updatedAt": "2026-07-27",
  "site": "https://worldmodelatlas.com/",
  "pageUrl": "https://worldmodelatlas.com/pulse/",
  "methodUrl": "https://worldmodelatlas.com/method/",
  "coverage": {
    "label": "People and moves behind selected world-model teams",
    "lastSourceReview": "2026-07-27",
    "isExhaustive": false,
    "note": "A deliberately small edition. Who appears here is decided by the organisations, not by Atlas: a team publishes a roster, and Atlas records what that roster says. It is not a directory, a ranking of researchers, or a source of career rumours.",
    "policy": [
      "Atlas does not judge which researchers matter enough to record. Every person here appears because their own organisation published them on a public team page. A team that publishes no roster gets no people records, which is the correct outcome rather than a gap to fill.",
      "Three sources are permitted, and all three share the property that the organisation decides rather than Atlas: its published roster or team page, its own announcement of a specific appointment or departure, and an institutional biography. Paper authorship never establishes employment and is never used to build a roster.",
      "No rumours, recruiting chatter, compensation, family details, precise location or other personal data.",
      "Additions and removals are not symmetric. A name appearing on a roster is the organisation asserting that the person is on the team, and can be recorded. A name disappearing is an absence, which can equally mean a page redesign, an error, leave, or the person's own request; it is never published as a departure without a second official source that is not the roster page.",
      "An announced move is distinguished from its effective date, and a listed member is distinguished from a leader, adviser or occasional collaborator.",
      "The Atlas reading may discuss what a change suggests about a team's technical direction. It never evaluates the person: not their ability, not their value, not their reasons, and not whether a move is good or bad for anyone.",
      "Anything labelled Atlas reading is editorial interpretation, not a fact stated by the source.",
      "A release is a fixed event but a role is a state that can stop being true with no announcement. Every record therefore carries the date it was read, and a record older than its review date describes what a source said then, not what is true now.",
      "A correction about a person is corrected first and discussed second. Write to editor@worldmodelatlas.com and the record is updated or removed without requiring the person to prove anything.",
      "A roster being published is not the same as a roster being maintained. Some directories carry material that predates current staffing, so the read date records when Atlas looked, never how current the page's contents are."
    ],
    "rosterStatus": [
      {
        "team": "AMI Labs (Advanced Machine Intelligence)",
        "status": "roster_published",
        "rosterUrl": "https://amilabs.xyz/",
        "lastRead": "2026-07-27"
      },
      {
        "team": "World Labs",
        "status": "roster_published",
        "rosterUrl": "https://www.worldlabs.ai/about",
        "lastRead": "2026-07-27"
      },
      {
        "team": "NVIDIA",
        "status": "roster_published",
        "rosterUrl": "https://research.nvidia.com/people",
        "lastRead": "2026-07-27",
        "scopeNote": "A full NVIDIA Research staff directory of roughly 450 individual profiles, not a Cosmos-specific team. The Cosmos Lab page itself names nobody."
      },
      {
        "team": "Meta AI",
        "status": "roster_published",
        "rosterUrl": "https://ai.meta.com/results/?content_types%5B0%5D=person",
        "lastRead": "2026-07-27",
        "scopeNote": "A paginated Meta AI researcher directory with per-person bios, filterable by research area and location. It spans all of Meta AI, not a world-model team."
      },
      {
        "team": "Waymo",
        "status": "roster_published",
        "rosterUrl": "https://waymo.com/about/",
        "lastRead": "2026-07-27",
        "scopeNote": "Ten company leaders with individual bio pages. It is a leadership roster, not a research-team roster."
      },
      {
        "team": "Wayve",
        "status": "roster_published",
        "rosterUrl": "https://wayve.ai/company/leadership-team/",
        "lastRead": "2026-07-27",
        "scopeNote": "A leadership team page with names and titles, including a Chief Scientist. It is not a research-team roster."
      },
      {
        "team": "Google DeepMind",
        "status": "no_public_roster",
        "lastRead": "2026-07-27",
        "scopeNote": "The about page names no individuals; /people and /about/leadership both return 404."
      },
      {
        "team": "OpenAI",
        "status": "no_public_roster",
        "lastRead": "2026-07-27",
        "scopeNote": "The about page covers mission, structure and careers and names no individuals."
      },
      {
        "team": "Waabi",
        "status": "no_public_roster",
        "lastRead": "2026-07-27",
        "scopeNote": "waabi.ai/team redirects to the homepage and /about returns 404. Waabi does announce senior appointments in its own Insights posts, which are a usable source even without a roster."
      },
      {
        "team": "Runway",
        "status": "no_public_roster",
        "lastRead": "2026-07-27",
        "scopeNote": "The about page covers products and careers and names no individuals; /team returns 404."
      }
    ],
    "rosterStatusNote": "A team missing from People & Moves has not been judged unimportant. Either it publishes no roster Atlas can use, or its roster is published but not yet recorded here. A published roster is permission to record, not a commitment to copy it: a directory of several hundred researchers is a source, and Atlas still records a bounded subset and says which."
  },
  "organizations": [
    {
      "id": "ami-labs",
      "name": "AMI Labs (Advanced Machine Intelligence)",
      "relevantToTeamId": null,
      "statedDirection": "AMI states that it develops world models which learn abstract representations of real-world sensor data, ignore unpredictable detail and make predictions in representation space rather than pixel space, and that action-conditioned world models let agents predict the consequences of actions and plan under safety guardrails.",
      "statedApplications": [
        "industrial process control",
        "automation",
        "wearable devices",
        "robotics",
        "healthcare"
      ],
      "locations": [
        "Paris",
        "New York",
        "Montreal",
        "Singapore"
      ],
      "listedPeople": [
        "Alex LeBrun",
        "Laurent Solly",
        "Mike Rabbat",
        "Min Lin",
        "Pascale Fung",
        "Saining Xie",
        "Yann LeCun"
      ],
      "listedPeopleNote": "Names as published on the AMI Labs site on 2026-07-27. The site gives no individual titles, start dates or prior affiliations, so Atlas does not assign any.",
      "atlasReading": "AMI is the first well-funded lab to make the latent-prediction position an explicit product thesis rather than one research direction among several, which puts the representation-space route and the generative-video route into open industrial competition.",
      "notConfirmed": [
        "Funding amount and valuation. Published reports disagree, and the company site states no figure, so Atlas publishes none.",
        "Individual roles, titles and start dates.",
        "Any released model, benchmark result or product."
      ],
      "sourceRole": "official_release",
      "sourceId": "ami-labs-official",
      "sourceTitle": "AMI Labs: Real World. Real Intelligence.",
      "sourceUrl": "https://amilabs.xyz/",
      "retrievedAt": "2026-07-27"
    },
    {
      "id": "world-labs-org",
      "name": "World Labs",
      "relevantToTeamId": "world-labs",
      "statedDirection": "World Labs describes itself as a spatial-intelligence company building world models that perceive, generate, reason about and interact with the 3D world, with Marble as its first product for creating persistent 3D worlds from a single image, video or text prompt.",
      "statedApplications": [
        "storytelling",
        "creativity and design",
        "simulation",
        "immersive experiences"
      ],
      "locations": [],
      "listedPeople": [
        "Fei-Fei Li",
        "Justin Johnson",
        "Christoph Lassner",
        "Ben Mildenhall"
      ],
      "listedPeopleNote": "Named by World Labs as the company's founders on its own About page on 2026-07-27. The page states no individual current titles.",
      "atlasReading": "The founding group is drawn from computer vision and graphics rather than from video generation, which is consistent with a product line organised around persistent 3D structure instead of clip quality.",
      "notConfirmed": [
        "Individual current titles and reporting lines.",
        "Team size and composition beyond the named founders.",
        "Any independent evaluation of Marble's spatial fidelity."
      ],
      "sourceRole": "official_release",
      "sourceId": "world-labs-about",
      "sourceTitle": "About | World Labs",
      "sourceUrl": "https://www.worldlabs.ai/about",
      "retrievedAt": "2026-07-27"
    },
    {
      "id": "nvidia-research",
      "name": "NVIDIA",
      "relevantToTeamId": "nvidia",
      "statedDirection": "NVIDIA Research describes itself as a team working to accelerate the evolution and application of the GPU across many fields. Its Cosmos work is the world-model line Pulse tracks.",
      "statedApplications": [
        "robotics",
        "autonomous vehicles",
        "vision AI",
        "content creation"
      ],
      "locations": [],
      "listedPeople": [
        "Ming-Yu Liu"
      ],
      "listedPeopleNote": "The directory carries roughly 450 profiles across all of NVIDIA Research. Atlas records only those it ties to the tracked world-model work; the Cosmos Lab page itself names nobody, so no team boundary is published. Everyone unrecorded is unselected, not unimportant.",
      "atlasReading": "NVIDIA publishes the largest roster of the tracked teams and the least structure around it: there is no published Cosmos team, so the directory answers who works at NVIDIA Research and not who builds Cosmos.",
      "notConfirmed": [
        "Who belongs to the Cosmos team; NVIDIA publishes no such grouping.",
        "Start dates and reporting lines for anyone listed.",
        "Whether the directory is current."
      ],
      "sourceRole": "official_release",
      "sourceId": "nvidia-research-people",
      "sourceTitle": "People | NVIDIA Research",
      "sourceUrl": "https://research.nvidia.com/people",
      "retrievedAt": "2026-07-27"
    },
    {
      "id": "meta-ai-org",
      "name": "Meta AI",
      "relevantToTeamId": "meta-ai",
      "statedDirection": "Meta AI's world-model line is the JEPA family, which predicts in representation space rather than generating pixels. Its directory groups researchers by research area and location.",
      "statedApplications": [
        "physical reasoning",
        "robotics",
        "representation learning"
      ],
      "locations": [],
      "listedPeople": [
        "David Fan",
        "Michael Rabbat"
      ],
      "listedPeopleNote": "A paginated directory across all Meta AI research areas. Atlas records only those whose own Meta biography ties them to the JEPA or world-model work. Meta publishes no leadership title over that work: filtering to Robotics surfaced one research manager whose stated remit is Conversational AI.",
      "atlasReading": "Meta is the only tracked team whose directory states team membership inside individual biographies, which makes a relevance filter possible without Atlas inventing one.",
      "notConfirmed": [
        "Who leads Meta's world-model work; no such title is published.",
        "How current the directory is; profile images carry 2024 timestamps.",
        "Whether Michael Rabbat's Meta listing or his AMI Labs listing reflects his present role."
      ],
      "sourceRole": "official_release",
      "sourceId": "meta-ai-people-directory",
      "sourceTitle": "Meta AI People",
      "sourceUrl": "https://ai.meta.com/results/?content_types%5B0%5D=person",
      "retrievedAt": "2026-07-27"
    },
    {
      "id": "waymo-org",
      "name": "Waymo",
      "relevantToTeamId": "waymo",
      "statedDirection": "Waymo publishes a company leadership roster. Its world-model work, the Genie 3-derived Waymo World Model, has no published team page.",
      "statedApplications": [
        "autonomous driving",
        "simulation"
      ],
      "locations": [],
      "listedPeople": [
        "Tekedra Mawakana",
        "Dmitri Dolgov",
        "Becky Bucich",
        "Steve Fieler",
        "Amar Mehta",
        "Satish Jeyachandran",
        "Ryan McNamara",
        "Saswat Panigrahi",
        "Mauricio Peña",
        "Srikanth Thirumalai"
      ],
      "listedPeopleNote": "Ten company leaders with titles, each with an individual biography page. This is the complete published roster, recorded in full because it is small and titled.",
      "atlasReading": "Nobody on this roster is described as leading the world-model work, so no individual record is created from it. The roster is recorded and the person list stays empty, which is the selection rule behaving correctly rather than a gap.",
      "notConfirmed": [
        "Who leads the Waymo World Model.",
        "Any research-team structure below the leadership level.",
        "Whether the acknowledgements in the World Model post correspond to roles; acknowledgements are not a roster."
      ],
      "sourceRole": "official_release",
      "sourceId": "waymo-leadership",
      "sourceTitle": "Waymo leadership",
      "sourceUrl": "https://waymo.com/about/",
      "retrievedAt": "2026-07-27"
    },
    {
      "id": "wayve-org",
      "name": "Wayve",
      "relevantToTeamId": "wayve",
      "statedDirection": "Wayve publishes a leadership team page including a Chief Scientist. Wayve is the publisher of GAIA-3, the driving world model Pulse tracks.",
      "statedApplications": [
        "autonomous driving",
        "offline evaluation"
      ],
      "locations": [],
      "listedPeople": [
        "Alex Kendall",
        "Erez Dagan",
        "Max Warburton",
        "Jamie Shotton",
        "Emma Baillie",
        "Dan McCloskey",
        "Kaity Fischer",
        "Silvius Rus",
        "Simone Fabris"
      ],
      "listedPeopleNote": "Nine leaders under Our Leadership Team. Titles were read reliably for Max Warburton, Jamie Shotton and Emma Baillie; for the other six the page pairs a title with each name but the extraction used did not associate them unambiguously, so Atlas records those names without titles rather than guessing.",
      "atlasReading": "Wayve is the only tracked driving team that publishes a Chief Scientist, which gives its research output a named point of responsibility that Waymo's and Waabi's public pages do not.",
      "notConfirmed": [
        "Six of the nine published titles, pending a cleaner read of the page.",
        "Whether the Chief Scientist role covers GAIA-3 specifically.",
        "Start dates for anyone listed."
      ],
      "sourceRole": "official_release",
      "sourceId": "wayve-leadership",
      "sourceTitle": "Our Leadership Team | Wayve",
      "sourceUrl": "https://wayve.ai/company/leadership-team/",
      "retrievedAt": "2026-07-27"
    }
  ],
  "people": [
    {
      "id": "fei-fei-li",
      "name": "Fei-Fei Li",
      "organizationId": "world-labs-org",
      "organization": "World Labs",
      "statedRole": "Founder",
      "roleStatus": "official_source_confirmed",
      "relevantToTeamId": "world-labs",
      "publicFocus": "Spatial intelligence; World Labs' stated programme of world models that perceive, generate, reason about and interact with the 3D world.",
      "sourceRole": "official_release",
      "sourceId": "world-labs-about",
      "sourceUrl": "https://www.worldlabs.ai/about",
      "retrievedAt": "2026-07-27",
      "boundary": "World Labs names her as founder. Atlas has not verified any current operating title, and no personal history beyond this public company statement is recorded here."
    },
    {
      "id": "justin-johnson",
      "name": "Justin Johnson",
      "organizationId": "world-labs-org",
      "organization": "World Labs",
      "statedRole": "Co-founder",
      "roleStatus": "official_source_confirmed",
      "relevantToTeamId": "world-labs",
      "publicFocus": "Named by World Labs among founders with backgrounds in machine learning, generative AI, computer vision and graphics; no individual focus statement is published on that page.",
      "sourceRole": "official_release",
      "sourceId": "world-labs-about",
      "sourceUrl": "https://www.worldlabs.ai/about",
      "retrievedAt": "2026-07-27",
      "boundary": "Co-founder status only. Current title, scope and prior affiliations are not established by this source."
    },
    {
      "id": "christoph-lassner",
      "name": "Christoph Lassner",
      "organizationId": "world-labs-org",
      "organization": "World Labs",
      "statedRole": "Co-founder",
      "roleStatus": "official_source_confirmed",
      "relevantToTeamId": "world-labs",
      "publicFocus": "Named by World Labs among founders with backgrounds in machine learning, generative AI, computer vision and graphics; no individual focus statement is published on that page.",
      "sourceRole": "official_release",
      "sourceId": "world-labs-about",
      "sourceUrl": "https://www.worldlabs.ai/about",
      "retrievedAt": "2026-07-27",
      "boundary": "Co-founder status only. Current title, scope and prior affiliations are not established by this source."
    },
    {
      "id": "ben-mildenhall",
      "name": "Ben Mildenhall",
      "organizationId": "world-labs-org",
      "organization": "World Labs",
      "statedRole": "Co-founder",
      "roleStatus": "official_source_confirmed",
      "relevantToTeamId": "world-labs",
      "publicFocus": "Named by World Labs among founders with backgrounds in machine learning, generative AI, computer vision and graphics; no individual focus statement is published on that page.",
      "sourceRole": "official_release",
      "sourceId": "world-labs-about",
      "sourceUrl": "https://www.worldlabs.ai/about",
      "retrievedAt": "2026-07-27",
      "boundary": "Co-founder status only. Current title, scope and prior affiliations are not established by this source."
    },
    {
      "id": "yann-lecun",
      "name": "Yann LeCun",
      "organizationId": "ami-labs",
      "organization": "AMI Labs (Advanced Machine Intelligence)",
      "statedRole": "Listed on the AMI Labs team",
      "roleStatus": "listed_title_unconfirmed",
      "relevantToTeamId": "meta-ai",
      "publicFocus": "Latent-prediction world models. AMI's own site describes predicting in representation space rather than generating unpredictable sensor detail, which is the position associated with the JEPA line of work covered elsewhere on this site.",
      "sourceRole": "official_release",
      "sourceId": "ami-labs-official",
      "sourceUrl": "https://amilabs.xyz/",
      "retrievedAt": "2026-07-27",
      "boundary": "The AMI Labs site lists him among its people but publishes no title. Search results on 2026-07-27 showed an Executive Chairman title on his own homepage and profile pages, but Atlas did not retrieve those pages in full, so the title is recorded as unconfirmed rather than stated as fact."
    },
    {
      "id": "ming-yu-liu",
      "name": "Ming-Yu Liu",
      "organizationId": "nvidia-research",
      "organization": "NVIDIA",
      "statedRole": "Vice President of Research; leads the Deep Imagination Research group",
      "roleStatus": "official_source_confirmed",
      "relevantToTeamId": "nvidia",
      "publicFocus": "Deep generative models and their applications in content creation. His NVIDIA profile associates him with NVIDIA Cosmos, the world-model line Pulse tracks, alongside NVIDIA Canvas and NVIDIA Maxine.",
      "sourceRole": "official_release",
      "sourceId": "nvidia-person-ming-yu-liu",
      "sourceUrl": "https://research.nvidia.com/person/ming-yu-liu",
      "retrievedAt": "2026-07-27",
      "boundary": "NVIDIA states two different titles for him: his profile says Vice President of Research leading Deep Imagination, while NVIDIA's SIGGRAPH 2026 news page says vice president of Cosmos Lab. Both are NVIDIA wordings and Atlas records both without reconciling them. Being associated with Cosmos on a profile page is not a statement that he leads Cosmos."
    },
    {
      "id": "david-fan",
      "name": "David Fan",
      "organizationId": "meta-ai-org",
      "organization": "Meta AI",
      "statedRole": "Research engineer, Meta FAIR, with the JEPA team",
      "roleStatus": "official_source_confirmed",
      "relevantToTeamId": "meta-ai",
      "publicFocus": "Meta's own biography places him with the JEPA team at Fundamental AI Research in New York, which is the representation-prediction line behind V-JEPA 2.",
      "sourceRole": "official_release",
      "sourceId": "meta-ai-people-directory",
      "sourceUrl": "https://ai.meta.com/results/?content_types%5B0%5D=person",
      "retrievedAt": "2026-07-27",
      "boundary": "Team membership as stated by Meta, with no seniority, scope or start date published. Membership of the JEPA team is not a claim about authorship of any specific model."
    },
    {
      "id": "michael-rabbat",
      "name": "Michael Rabbat",
      "organizationId": "meta-ai-org",
      "organization": "Meta AI",
      "statedRole": "Founding member of the FAIR team in Montreal",
      "roleStatus": "official_source_confirmed",
      "relevantToTeamId": "meta-ai",
      "publicFocus": "Named by Meta as a founding member of FAIR Montreal, and an author on the Meta-listed paper Interpreting Physics in Video World Models that Pulse tracks.",
      "sourceRole": "official_release",
      "sourceId": "meta-ai-people-directory",
      "sourceUrl": "https://ai.meta.com/results/?content_types%5B0%5D=person",
      "retrievedAt": "2026-07-27",
      "boundary": "Unresolved across two rosters. On 2026-07-27 Meta's directory listed him while amilabs.xyz listed Mike Rabbat among the AMI Labs team. Atlas records both listings and infers no move in either direction: a directory can be stale, and two rosters are not evidence about each other. Treating the two names as one person is an Atlas judgement from the matching name form, shared Montreal location and shared FAIR association, not something either source states."
    },
    {
      "id": "jamie-shotton",
      "name": "Jamie Shotton",
      "organizationId": "wayve-org",
      "organization": "Wayve",
      "statedRole": "Chief Scientist",
      "roleStatus": "official_source_confirmed",
      "relevantToTeamId": "wayve",
      "publicFocus": "Published as Wayve's Chief Scientist. Wayve is the publisher of GAIA-3, the driving world model Pulse tracks.",
      "sourceRole": "official_release",
      "sourceId": "wayve-leadership",
      "sourceUrl": "https://wayve.ai/company/leadership-team/",
      "retrievedAt": "2026-07-27",
      "boundary": "Wayve publishes the title and nothing more. It does not say the role covers GAIA-3 specifically, and no start date is given. A company-wide science title is not a claim of authorship or of technical responsibility for any named model."
    }
  ],
  "moves": [
    {
      "id": "lecun-meta-to-ami-labs",
      "personId": "yann-lecun",
      "name": "Yann LeCun",
      "type": "new_lab",
      "announcedAt": "2026",
      "datePrecision": "year",
      "fromOrganization": "Meta",
      "toOrganization": "AMI Labs (Advanced Machine Intelligence)",
      "confirmed": "AMI Labs publicly lists Yann LeCun among its people, and the company publishes a world-model research direction built on prediction in representation space.",
      "notConfirmed": [
        "His exact title at AMI Labs.",
        "The date he left Meta and the date he started at AMI Labs.",
        "Funding raised and valuation. Reports seen during this review disagree materially, so no figure is published.",
        "Any stated reason for the departure."
      ],
      "atlasReading": "Whatever the terms, the field's most prominent public critic of pixel-generative world models now sits behind a company built on the opposing thesis. That makes the latent-prediction versus generative-simulation split an industrial fact rather than only a research debate, and it is worth watching what evidence each side publishes.",
      "sourceRole": "official_release",
      "sourceId": "ami-labs-official",
      "sourceTitle": "AMI Labs: Real World. Real Intelligence.",
      "sourceUrl": "https://amilabs.xyz/",
      "retrievedAt": "2026-07-27"
    }
  ]
}