‘Godmother of AI’ launches World Labs with $230M funding at $1B valuation
Fei-Fei Li, former Google Cloud AI director and co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, announced the launch of “World Labs” after two successful funding rounds.
Artificial intelligence startup World Labs announced its official launch on Sept. 13. The firm is reportedly valued at over $1 billion and has raised more than $230 million in funding to build “spatial intelligence” systems.
World Labs was co-founded by Fei-Fei-Li, the former Google Cloud AI boss. Due to her involvement in much of the foundational research behind modern generative artificial intelligence, Fei-Fei-Li is often referred to as the “Godmother of AI.” She’s also the current co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.
Spatial artificial intelligence
World Labs describes its primary product as “Large World Models” (LWMs). In a blog post announcing the company’s launch, it pointed out that current generative AI models can only interact with the world through text, audio, and video.
Humans, on the other hand, experience the world as a three-dimensional space with physics that relates to the passage of time.
“To advance beyond the capabilities of today’s models,” the World Labs team wrote, “we need spatially intelligent AI that can model the world and reason about objects, places, and interactions in 3D space and time.”
World Labs aims to bridge the gap between AI models that interpret the world through a 2D lens and artificial agents capable of perceiving 3D worlds by “creating and editing virtual spaces complete with physics, semantics, and control.”