After nearly ten years at Meta, why did you decide to join PRESAGE and return to Paris to build a company?

There are two dimensions to this decision: scientific continuity, first, and a more personal choice, second.

From a scientific perspective, joining PRESAGE is a natural progression from the work I have been doing for several years. Much of my research has focused on how models can perceive the world, build representations of it, understand its dynamics and anticipate how it will evolve. At Meta, I explored these questions in relation to the physical world and the interactions between humans, machines and their environment.

With PRESAGE, I am continuing on that path in a different domain: the digital world. Cloud infrastructure or a data center is, in its own way, an extremely complex environment, with millions of entities and interactions constantly evolving. With Digital World Models, or DWM, our ambition is to enable models to understand this complexity, anticipate its evolution and, above all, simulate different possible futures.

That is precisely what makes the subject so exciting: in the digital world, we can simulate a failure, an attack, an intervention or an extreme scenario, observe the consequences and learn from those simulations without taking the risk of causing them in the real system. There is genuine scientific continuity, applied to a new domain.

On a personal level, this decision also reflects a desire that gradually took shape. I built my career across France, Japan and the United States, in highly international research and technology environments. After nearly ten years at Meta, I wanted to return to entrepreneurship: to build something, assemble a team and pursue a scientific vision over the long term.

Returning to Paris is part of that ambition. The idea is not to come back to build a purely French or European project. It is to demonstrate that we can build a technology and science company from Paris with truly global ambitions.

World Models are also central to current advances in robotics. Do you see connections between the technologies developed by PRESAGE and the future of autonomous robots?

Yes, absolutely. From a scientific perspective, the principles are very similar. A truly autonomous robot must be able to understand the state of its environment, anticipate how it will evolve and, above all, simulate the consequences of different actions before deciding how to intervene. That is precisely one of the challenges World Models address.

At PRESAGE, we apply this approach to the digital world through Digital World Models: understanding complex systems, predicting their evolution and simulating different scenarios. But a data center is not just a software system. It is also a physical environment, with machines, networks, power, cooling and equipment that needs maintenance or repair.

As these infrastructures become more autonomous, those two dimensions will converge. Digital World Models will be able to understand the system as a whole, anticipate incidents and determine which actions to take, while robotics will be able to intervene in the physical world. Ultimately, digital and physical autonomy will become part of the same continuum.

A truly autonomous robot must be able to understand the state of its environment, anticipate how it will evolve and, above all, simulate the consequences of different actions before deciding how to intervene.

AI infrastructure and data centers are becoming increasingly complex. How autonomous could they become with your technologies?

In the short to medium term, the goal is to enable infrastructure to do more than react to events: it should anticipate its own operation. If it can predict changes in its workloads, computing requirements or energy consumption, it can allocate resources more effectively, adjust cooling or intervene before an incident occurs.

At the scale of the infrastructure required for AI, these optimizations could deliver substantial gains in reliability, performance, energy efficiency and environmental impact.

Over the longer term, our vision goes much further. We can imagine data centers operating with minimal human intervention, or even without a permanent human presence on site. Combined with autonomous robots capable of carrying out certain maintenance tasks, they could be deployed in environments that are highly challenging today: deserts, Arctic regions, at sea or perhaps one day in space.

For us, autonomy is therefore more than a way to improve the automation of existing data centers. It could allow us to rethink their architecture, their location and, more broadly, what a data center can be.

What are your ambitions for PRESAGE over the coming years, in France and internationally?

Our ambition has several dimensions.

First, from a scientific and technological perspective, we are currently developing Digital World Models for cloud and AI infrastructure. The next step is to move beyond specialized models and build true foundation models of digital worlds: models that can learn principles general enough to work across very different environments, adapt to new situations and transfer what they have learned from one system to another.

This is a major scientific challenge. Digital infrastructure is constantly evolving and combines hardware, software, networks, energy and, increasingly, AI agents at an enormous scale. Learning the dynamics of such complex systems opens up a field of research that remains largely unexplored.

Then there is our international ambition. We want to build this fundamental technology from France and Europe, but with global reach from the outset. The infrastructures we aim to model are global, so our technologies must be able to operate on the most complex systems, regardless of their architecture or location.

Ultimately, our ambition is clear: to make Digital World Models a fundamental intelligence layer for autonomous computing systems.

FAQ – Tony Tung, PRESAGE and Digital World Models

Cet article Tony Tung: “Digital and physical autonomy will become part of the same continuum” est apparu en premier sur Robot Magazine.