World Labs, Founded by Fei-Fei Li, Raises $230M to Develop Spatially Intelligent AI
​Fei-Fei Li, a leading artificial intelligence researcher, has raised $230 million for World  Labs, a startup she co-founded with three colleagues to develop AI technology capable of understanding the 3D physical world. The funding was led by Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, and Radical Ventures, with additional support from industry leaders such as Marc Benioff, Eric Schmidt, and Geoffrey Hinton. The company plans to focus initially on generating and editing 3D worlds with realistic physics and semantics, offering creative users new tools to expand the potential of generative AI. The company’s mission is to build Large World Models (LWMs) that can perceive, generate, and interact with the 3D world, moving beyond the 2D capabilities of current AI models. Co-founded by Li, along with Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, and Ben Mildenhall, World Labs seeks to enable AI systems with spatial intelligence akin to that of humans. The founders and their team of experts in computer vision and graphics plan to create AI models capable of understanding objects, places, and interactions in 3D space and time. “What is a really really hard problem to work on in AI? My own answer is Spatial Intelligence – a technology that could empower and enable countless possible use cases in creation, design, learning, AR/VR, robotics, and beyond,” posted Li on X. The team at World Labs believes AI will empower people and further humanity’s progress, following centuries of technological advancements. The company aims to bridge the gap between research and applications, and will reveal more about its technology in the coming months. Li, often referred to as the ‘Godmother of AI,’  is a renowned computer scientist and AI researcher who has made significant contributions to the field of artificial intelligence. Born in China and immigrating to the United States as a teenager, Li’s academic journey led her to earn a BA in Physics from Princeton University and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Caltech. As a professor at Stanford University, Li holds several prestigious positions, including Sequoia Capital Professor of Computer Science and Co-Director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute. Her research interests span cognitively inspired AI, machine learning, computer vision, and AI applications in healthcare. Li’s impact extends beyond academia, having served as Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud and as a board member at Twitter. She is also a passionate advocate for diversity in STEM and AI, co-founding AI4ALL, a nonprofit organization with a mission to increase inclusion in AI education.
The company’s mission is to build Large World Models (LWMs) that can perceive, generate, and interact with the 3D world, moving beyond the 2D capabilities of current AI models.
​Fei-Fei Li, a leading artificial intelligence researcher, has raised $230 million for World  Labs, a startup she co-founded with three colleagues to develop AI technology capable of understanding the 3D physical world.
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["AI", "artificial intelligence", "machine learning", "ML", "computer vision", "generative AI", "Aim", "R", "Go", "API"]
Siddharth is a media graduate who loves to explore tech through journalism and putting forward ideas worth pondering about in the era of artificial intelligence.