A well-known computer scientist, Fei-Fei Li, the “godmother of AI,” started a World Labs company. The Financial Times said that it’s now worth more than $1 billion after only four months.
Reuters reported in May that World Labs wants to make AI smart enough to use human-like processing of visual data to make it smart enough to make complex decisions. It is still being worked on to make it more like a person, much like what ChatGPT is doing with generative AI.
Computer vision is a branch of AI that helps machines understand and analyze visual information. She also led the creation of ImageNet, a huge visual collection used for studying how to recognize objects with the naked eye. From 2017 to 2018, Li was in charge of AI at Google Cloud. He now advises on AI to a White House task group.
An unnamed venture investor who knows about Li’s work told the Financial Times that World Labs is working on a model that can understand the three-dimensional physical world, including the sizes of things, where they are, and what they do.
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World Labs Secures $100M in Funding Led by Andreessen Horowitz and Radical Ventures
The company has raised two rounds of funding, the most recent of which was about $100 million. Andreessen Horowitz and Radical Ventures, an AI fund that Li joined as a partner last year, are both backing it. Li started World Labs while she was on a break from her job as co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute.
In an April Ted Talk, Li talked more about the area of research that her startup will be working to advance. It involves creating algorithms that can realistically extrapolate text and images into three-dimensional environments and then acting on those predictions. This is called “spatial intelligence.” Robotics, augmented reality, virtual reality, and computer vision are some of the areas that could benefit from this. These skills could change fields like healthcare and manufacturing if they keep getting better in the big ways Li wants them to.
The investment in World Labs is part of a trend among venture investors to quickly join forces with ambitious AI companies. This is because OpenAI’s ChatGPT became a huge surprise hit and was quickly worth more than $80 billion.
