Object Permanence

The cognitive understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be observed, heard, or otherwise sensed.

Cognitive Foundations

• A fundamental milestone in Jean Piaget’s stages of sensorimotor development.
• Requires the ability to maintain internal representations of entities across temporal and spatial gaps, forming the basis of world-models.

Implications for Artificial Intelligence

• A critical benchmark for achieving AGI, moving beyond pattern recognition toward true physical understanding.
• Emerging Non-LLM Architectures:
  • vl-jepa (Meta FAIR): A shift toward vision-language joint-embedding predictive architectures, moving away from the limitations of generative-ai and llm text-only models.
  • Core Thesis: “Language is not intelligence”; true intelligence requires modeling the physical dynamics of the world.
  • Research Focus: Utilizing vision-based approaches to predict latent states, spearheaded by Yann LeCun.
  • Goal: Developing architectures that can predict the persistence of objects in a visual field without relying on generative token prediction.

Related Notes

• 2026 04 14 New paper for a vision approach to AGI not LLM

Source Notes

• 2026-04-14: How to get TACK SHARP photos with any camera!