BuildCity x NEAR Legion: Builders Cafe

​AI Research Paper Reading, Discussion & Networking Series #4:

​🧠 Builders Cafe: JEPA Deep Dive — How AI Learns the World

​What if intelligence isn't about generating the world — but learning to predict it?

​Today's AI is remarkably good at generating text, images, and code. But does it truly understand the world?

​In A Path Towards Autonomous Machine Intelligence, Yann LeCun proposes a different path — one built on world models, memory, prediction, reasoning, planning, and action, with JEPA (Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture) at its core.

​🔬 What We'll Explore

• ​What is JEPA?

• ​Why predict representations instead of pixels?

• ​What are world models?

• ​How do memory, reasoning, and planning fit together?

• ​How does this differ from today's LLMs?

• ​Can machines learn more like humans?

​💭 Question for the Room

​Do we need to generate the world to understand it — or can intelligence emerge by learning the right abstractions?

​📖 Pre-reading

​JEPA Deep Dive: Read the guide

​Paper: A Path Towards Autonomous Machine Intelligence — Yann LeCun - original paper

​Pre-reading is helpful but not required. We'll unpack the core ideas together.

​📄 Printed copies of the guide will be provided.

​☕ Builders Cafe

​A community-led research series where we read important AI papers, build mental models, challenge assumptions, and explore what the research means for what we build next.