Kyutai and ELLIS Institute Tübingen launch KE:SAI, an open-science physical-AI lab

2026-05-20★★businessKyutaiELLIS Institute Tübingenconfidence: high

On 2026-05-20 Kyutai and the ELLIS Institute Tübingen launched KE:SAI (Kyutai ELLIS Scalable Autonomous Intelligence), a Franco-German non-profit open-science lab in Tübingen and Paris for world models and autonomy. Its first goal is a fully open self-driving stack, to be extended later to manufacturing and healthcare robotics.

Key facts

Founding team: Andreas Geiger (CEO), Kashyap Chitta (CTO), Bernhard Schölkopf (ELLIS/MPI scientific director), Bernhard Jaeger, Daniel Dauner
Initial funding from Kyutai (amount not disclosed). Kyutai is backed by iliad, CMA CGM and Eric and Wendy Schmidt's philanthropy
Focus areas: world models for data- and compute-efficient robot learning, 3D vision, data-driven simulation, causality

What happened

Kyutai, the Paris open-science lab best known for Moshi, expanded from speech into physical AI. It co-founded a new lab with the ELLIS Institute Tübingen, led by University of Tübingen professor Andreas Geiger (CEO).

Why it matters

It is one of the few European efforts aimed at open frontier physical AI, with a public goal (an open self-driving stack) that big labs mostly pursue behind closed doors.

Changelog

2026-09-29: created

Related events

2026-07-06General Intuition and Kyutai release MIRA, a real-time multiplayer world model of Rocket League ★★

Sources (4)

id: 2026-05-20-kyutai-ellis-kesai-lab · updated 2026-09-29 · open in the interactive timeline