Fei-Fei Li, the renowned computer scientist known as the “godmother of AI,” has created a startup dubbed World Labs. In just four months, it’s already valued at more than $1 billion, the Financial Times reported.
The ‘godmother of AI’ has a new startup already worth $1 billion
Fei-Fei Li’s company, called World Labs, is backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Radical Ventures.
Fei-Fei Li’s company, called World Labs, is backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Radical Ventures.
Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for WIRED
World Labs hopes to use “human-like processing of visual data” to bring advanced reasoning capabilities to AI, Reuters reported in May. The research to make it human-like, much like what ChatGPT is trying to do with generative AI, is still ongoing.
Li is best known for her contributions to computer vision, a branch of AI dedicated to helping machines interpret and comprehend visual information. She currently advises the White House task force on AI and previously headed AI at Google Cloud from 2017 to 2018. Li also spearheaded the development of ImageNet, an extensive visual database used for visual object recognition research.
“[World Labs] is developing a model that understands the three-dimensional physical world; essentially the dimensions of objects, where things are and what they do,” an anonymous venture capitalist with knowledge of Li’s work told the Financial Times.
This could bolster work in various fields such as robotics, augmented reality, and virtual reality
The startup has had two funding rounds, the latest was about $100 million, and it’s backed by Andreessen Horowitz and the AI fund Radical Ventures (which Li joined as a partner last year).
Li is a co-director of the Human-Centered AI Institute, a research lab at Stanford; she founded World Labs while on a partial leave from the university, FT reports.
In a Ted Talk in April, Li further explained the field of research her startup will work on advancing, which involves a concept called “spatial intelligence” that involves transforming images and text into 3D spaces and using those changes to make predictions. This could bolster work in various fields such as robotics, augmented reality, virtual reality, and computer vision. If these capabilities continue to advance in the ambitious ways Li plans, it has the potential to transform industries like healthcare and manufacturing.
The investment in World Labs reflects a trend where venture capitalists eagerly align themselves with ambitious AI companies, spurred by the surprise success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which rapidly achieved a valuation exceeding $80 billion.
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