3 VinFuture scientists in the Top 100 influential people in the field of AI in 2026
(Dan Tri) - The two winners of the 2024 VinFuture Main Award are Professor. Yann LeCun and Professor. Fei-Fei Li with Professor. Daniela Rus, VinFuture Award Council Member, has just been honored by TIME magazine in the TIME100 AI 2026 list.
This is the fourth year TIME has published an annual list to honor the 100 individuals who have the most profound impact on the world's future of AI.
All three VinFuture scientists this year are pursuing groundbreaking research directions to help AI expand its ability to understand and interact with the physical world from "world model", "spatial intelligence" to "embodied intelligence".
Professor. Yann LeCun (far right) receives the 2024 VinFuture Main Award in Hanoi (Photo: VFP).
Professor. Yann LeCun: Finding ways to break the limits of large language models
According to TIME, while much of the technology industry continues to scale large language models (LLMs), Prof. LeCun believes that this direction will not help AI reach human-level intelligence.
At AMI Labs, a company led by Prof. LeCun co-founded after leaving Meta, his team is pursuing a different approach, aiming to help AI develop an intuitive understanding of the fundamental laws of the physical world.
The focus is on “world models”, which allow AI to build an internal model of how the world works and predict the consequences of different actions, thereby supporting the ability to choose the appropriate course of action.
According to TIME, this approach has the potential to help AI become more powerful in fields such as robotics, autonomous vehicles and medicine. This explains why in March, AMI Labs set a record when it raised more than $1 billion in investment capital in a seed round.
Professor. Fei-Fei Li: Opening up the field of “spatial intelligence”
With Professor. Li, a prominent focus of her recent research is “spatial intelligence,” which aims to help AI move from image recognition to the ability to understand three-dimensional structures and the physical world.
This research direction comes from the observation that simply learning from text and 2D images is not enough for AI to truly understand and interact with the physical world. Just like reading every book about basketball is not the same as knowing how to shoot a ball, AI needs to be able to understand space, objects and how they operate in a 3D world.
Professor. Fei-Fei Li shares when awarded the 2024 VinFuture Main Award (Photo: VFP).
This is the problem that Professor. Li and her colleagues are working on a solution at World Labs, the company she co-founded in 2024. The first product, Marble, allows users to create and explore 3D worlds from text, images or video, while also recreating depth and spatial composition.
One of the important applications of this technology is to create simulation environments to train and evaluate robots before they operate in the real world.
Professor. Daniela Rus: Bringing artificial intelligence into the real world
According to TIME, one of the highlights of Prof. Rus is developing nature-inspired AI architectures that are capable of operating effectively at a significantly smaller scale than neural networks typically trained for the same task.
In 2020, Professor Rus and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed a microscopic neural network inspired by the nervous system of worms but still capable of controlling cars in the right lane.
This research direction later became one of the foundations for Liquid AI, the company founded by Prof. Rus and his colleagues founded it three years later to develop highly capable AI systems that are more computationally and resource efficient.
TIME highlights Professor's journey of more than three decades. Rus in the field of robotics, with the goal of developing "embodied intelligence", which means bringing AI into robots and physical devices so they can sense the environment, make decisions and perform actions in the real world. Her research is being applied in automobiles, logistics and automation.
Professor. Rus is currently the Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. She will become a member of the VinFuture Awards Council from 2025 (Photo: CSAIL).
From the foundations of modern AI to expanding the frontiers of future technology
In 2024, VinFuture awards the Main Prize worth 3 million USD to Professor. Yann LeCun, Professor. Fei-Fei Li, Professor. Joshua Bengio, Professor. Geoffrey Hinton and Mr. Jen-Hsun Huang for their groundbreaking contributions promoting the advancement of deep learning.
The award comprehensively recognizes the foundational contributions that have shaped the modern AI revolution: from neural networks and deep learning algorithms, large-scale data to accelerated computing platforms.
Two years later, TIME100 AI 2026 continues to honor Professor. LeCun and Professor. Li has a special sense of continuity: from the foundational contributions that fueled the deep learning revolution to efforts to expand the current frontiers of AI, toward systems better able to understand and interact with space and the physical world.
This impression is even stronger with the presence of Professor. Daniela Rus - a member of the VinFuture Award Council and also leading pioneering research in AI and robotics.
The fact that all three scientists are participating in TIME100 AI 2026 continues to affirm the international stature of the VinFuture science network. Beyond the framework of an award, VinFuture is connecting humanity's elite scientific community, where influential achievements are honored, pioneering ideas are shared, and breakthroughs with the potential to shape the future are identified and promoted.