Hack the World(s)

24 hours to rethink AI.

JEPA DINO-WM WORLD MODELS SELF-SUPERVISED PLANNING

+ LLMs predict tokens.
+ World models understand space, time, causality.
- That's the gap we're hacking on.

LLMs are good at completing text. They're bad at understanding what happens next.

Hack the World(s) is a 24-hour, no-sleep hackathon built around world models — systems that build an internal representation of reality instead of just predicting the next token. The architecture at the center of it: JEPA (Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture), designed by Yann LeCun, who's also backing this edition directly.

No reconstructing pixels. No brute-force generation. Predict in representation space, the way a brain does — and use that to plan.

Run by ESIEE Paris, Mines Nancy / ACADI, and Institut PR[AI]RIE. Backed by AI Factory France.

Teams of 4, picked from the best engineering schools and universities in France. Everyone gets a pass for VivaTech, Europe's biggest tech show. No sleep schedule provided.

The technical core of this edition is eb_jepa — an open-source library for Energy-Based Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures, built out of Meta AI Research (FAIR).

Teams train and plan on top of it — image, video, and action-conditioned JEPA — distributed across an HPC cluster via Slurm. Bring your own seed, fight for your own GPU hours.

# what the 25 teams are actually doing this weekend
for team in teams:
    model = JEPA(predict="representations", not_="pixels")
    model.train(gpu=cluster.allocate(team))
    plan = model.plan(horizon="the next 24 hours")

FRI 19 ───────────────────────────────────────────────
  morning   →  VivaTech, free roam
  13:30     →  opening keynote · Philippe Baptiste
  13:45     →  opening keynote · Yann LeCun
  16:15     →  convoy to ESIEE Paris · GPUs go live
  19:00     →  ⚡ clock starts. 24h on the board.

SAT 20 ───────────────────────────────────────────────
  17:30     →  demos → jury → closing ceremony

This edition is running right now, June 19–20, 2026. The clock started at 19:00 on the 19th and stops at 17:30 on the 20th.

Patronage: Philippe Baptiste, French Minister for Higher Education, Research & Space. Sponsorship: Yann LeCun, Turing Award · ESIEE Paris alumnus · Executive Chairman, AMI Labs.