World Labs. This startup was founded in April this year and has already completed two rounds of funding, quickly reaching a valuation of over $1 billion.
According to informed sources, the company received about $100 million in its latest round of funding, with investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Radical Ventures. However, neither of these investment firms responded to media requests for comment.
Fei-Fei Li founded World Labs during her sabbatical from Stanford University, where she serves as co-director of the Human-Centered AI Institute.
Li's company aims to attempt creating "spatial intelligence" in AI by developing human-like abilities to process visual data. In a TED talk in Vancouver in April, Li discussed this concept, describing the potential for machines to understand and navigate three-dimensional space—work that would represent a major breakthrough in AI, helping it interact with real environments and advance more complex autonomous systems.
Li said in her talk, "If we want AI to go beyond its current capabilities, we need more than AI that can see and speak. We need AI that can do."
To illustrate the concept of spatial intelligence, she pointed to an image of a cat knocking over a glass. She explained, "In that last instant, your brain sees the geometric shape of this glass, its position in 3D space, its relationship to the table, the cat, and everything else, and you can predict what's going to happen next."
Li is a renowned AI scientist, known as the "Godmother of AI." In 2009, Li joined Stanford University and quickly rose to prominence in the AI field. In computer vision, the ImageNet project led by Li and her students can be considered a milestone breakthrough. ImageNet created the largest image recognition database at the time, driving the development of neural network algorithms.
Li has received numerous important awards, including the NVIDIA AI Research Award, the J.K. Aggarwal Prize from the International Association for Pattern Recognition, and the Abie Award for Technology Leadership.
Between 2013 and 2018, she served as the director of Stanford's AI Lab, leading several important AI research projects. From 2017 to 2018, she was Vice President at Google and Chief Scientist of Google Cloud AI/ML, advancing the company's AI and machine learning technologies.
In 2019, Li became co-director of Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute (HAI), promoting interdisciplinary research that combines AI technology with human values. She also co-founded and chairs AI4ALL, advocating for diverse participation. From 2020 to 2022, she served on Twitter's board of directors and as an advisor to the White House AI task force.
Li's vision for "spatial intelligence" is even more ambitious: ### training a machine that can understand the complex physical world and the inherent relationships between objects within it. A venture capitalist familiar with Li's work said in an interview, "World Labs is developing a model that can understand the three-dimensional physical world; basically the ### dimensions, positions, and ### functions of objects."