Artificial intelligence is evolving at an extraordinary pace. Over the last few years, generative AI models like GPT-4 and other large vision-language systems have amazed the world by writing, reasoning, and interpreting images and video. Yet behind the excitement, these systems still rely on a simple idea: predicting the next word or pixel, one step at a time. In late 2025, Meta’s AI research team introduced a radical alternative called VL-JEPA (Vision-Language Joint Embe