Meta shows off two big AI upgrades – one helps robots, the other helps you

When we talk about AI, most people immediately think of Google or OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. But while those two often get all the headlines, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has been moving fast, too – and now it is making some serious noise with two big AI announcements.

Meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, has just unveiled a new AI model that can actually think before it acts and a new video editing feature powered by AI. The latter is clearly aimed at the billions of people using Meta's platforms every day.

But let's start with the one that sounds straight out of a sci-fi movie – the new model is called V-JEPA 2 and it is basically a brain for robots and AI agents. The idea? To help them understand the physical world and predict how it reacts to their actions, just like we humans do without even thinking about it.

When we walk through a crowded space, we are constantly predicting what is about to happen – avoiding people, dodging obstacles and moving toward our goal. We don't pause to analyze every move, we just know what's likely to happen. Well, according to Meta, V-JEPA 2 is designed to teach AI that same kind of intuition by building what's called a world model.

These world models allow AI to do three core things: understand, predict and plan. V-JEPA 2 is trained on video footage, which lets it learn how objects move, how people interact with those objects and how everything behaves in the physical world.

It builds on the original V-JEPA model Meta dropped last year, but now it is better at understanding unfamiliar environments – like when a robot encounters a brand-new space or task.

Meta says it tested V-JEPA 2 in the lab and robots using the model were able to do stuff like reach out, grab things and move them around. That might sound basic, but in the world of robotics, that's a pretty big deal.

Of course, Meta isn't the only company chasing this type of AI. Google launched its Gemini 2.0 model last year, focused on making AI better at reasoning, remembering and planning.  OpenAI is also in the game with its own AI agent that can manage tasks for you. However, Meta seems to be leaning into helpful use cases – but at the end of the day, nobody really knows how this all plays out.