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TL;DR
- AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li has launched World Labs, a startup focused on developing AI with “spatial intelligence,” raising $230 million in initial funding from major tech investors.
- The company aims to create “large world models” (LWMs) that can understand and reason about the 3D physical world, potentially revolutionizing fields like AR/VR and robotics.
- World Labs’ approach combines synthetic and real-world data for training, using transformer-based architecture similar to ChatGPT but with additional elements to enhance 3D understanding.
- Li, known as the “godmother of AI,” will lead the 20-employee San Francisco-based startup while continuing her work at Stanford University’s Human-Centered AI Institute.
Artificial intelligence pioneer Fei-Fei Li has launched a new startup called World Labs, securing $230 million in initial funding to develop AI technology capable of understanding the three-dimensional physical world. The funding round was jointly led by Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise Associates, and Radical Ventures, with additional investments from AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, and Nvidia’s NVentures.
Li, often referred to as the “godmother of AI,” is a Stanford University professor who previously led AI efforts at Google Cloud from 2017 to 2018 and served on Twitter’s board of directors. She has also advised policymakers, including at the White House, and was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2023.
World Labs aims to create AI models with “spatial intelligence,” focusing on the ability to reason about how the 3D world works. Li explained the significance of this approach:
“The images and videos that you have seen so far coming out of generative AI models do not give you enough of the whole sense of how a 3D world is built. The way we understand the structure of the world, imagined or real, will fundamentally be a piece of this AI puzzle.”
The San Francisco-based startup, which currently employs 20 people, plans to train what they call “large world models” or “LWMs.” These models will use a combination of synthetic and real-world data for training. While they will utilize the transformer-based architecture similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Li indicated that their approach would incorporate additional elements beyond this foundation.
Li’s co-founders in this venture include computer vision researchers Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, and Ben Mildenhall. The team’s expertise builds on Li’s previous work developing ImageNet, a large-scale image dataset that revolutionized computer vision technologies and their ability to identify objects reliably.
News Source: India Times
