VLAs are dead, long live World Action Models - a summary of Jim Fan's Robotics End Game talk (opens in new tab)

"Our generation was born too late to explore the Earth and too early to explore the stars, but we are born just in time to solve robotics." -- Jim Fan, AI Ascent 2026 That's how Jim Fan closed his talk at Sequoia's AI Ascent 2026 - and it might be the most concise summary of where robotics stands right now. Fan leads Nvidia's embodied autonomous research group (essentially Nvidia Robotics). At last year's AI Ascent he was a standout presenter. This year, he came back with a bolder claim: robo...