Often regarded as the ‘AI Godmother’ Chinese-American computer scientist, a pioneer of the artificial intelligence (AI) domain, Fei Fei Li last week raised $230 million for her AI startup World Labs.
The startup is valued at over $1 billion after the funding round which was led by prominent investors including Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise Associates, and Radical Ventures, with additional backing from major tech players like AMD, Intel, and Nvidia.
The San Francisco-based World Labs was founded by Li along with three other computer vision researchers, is working to develop advanced AI models that understand the three-dimensional physical world – jumping over the current AI landscape.
World Labs focuses on “spatial intelligence” a form of reasoning that will allow AI systems to grasp the structure of 3D environments. This capability is expected to have wide-ranging applications, particularly in augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and robotics.
Currently, the World Labs team possesses 20 people who are building “Large World Models” (LWMs) that combine real-world and synthetic data to train AI systems. These models will incorporate transformer-based architectures, the same foundational technology used in OpenAI’s ChatGPT, though Li hinted at innovations beyond this approach.
Li, often dubbed the “godmother of AI” for her pioneering work on the ImageNet dataset, which enabled significant advances in computer vision, continues to shape the future of artificial intelligence.
Speaking for World Labs in contrast to the current AI landscape, Li said that the current AI models can generate impressive images and text, but they lack the ability to truly understand how the 3D world is built. World Labs aims to solve this problem by unlocking broader reasoning capabilities in AI, avoiding the common “hallucinations” seen in generative models today.
According to the reports, despite the demands of building a cutting-edge startup, Li will continue her academic role at Stanford University’s Human-Centered AI Institute. This is not her first entrepreneurial venture – while a student at Princeton, she managed a family business, a testament to her determination and work ethic.
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