Li Feifei and the Rise of Artificial Intelligence at World Labs

Li Feifei Secures $230 Million for World Labs

Artificial intelligence pioneer Li Feifei has raised US$230 million from a star-studded list of investors for a new AI start-up called World Labs, which officially launched on Friday. The company aims to build software that can use images and other data to make decisions about the three-dimensional world, constructing what it calls large world models.

The funding is a sign of investors’ continued appetite for technology that pushes the boundaries of AI, as well as the draw of the field’s biggest names. The new funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, and Radical Ventures, a Canadian venture capital firm where Li is also a scientific partner. World Labs declined to disclose its valuation.

A number of well-known figures in AI also invested, including Jeff Dean, chief scientist of Google DeepMind, and Geoffrey Hinton, a former Google AI researcher known for his contributions to machine learning and an investor in Radical Ventures. Nvidia’s venture arm has also backed the company.

Other individual investors include venture capitalist and actor Ashton Kutcher, Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

The San Francisco-based start-up plans to create virtual 3D spaces where users can control variables such as physics; the company will also enable users to design their own 3D worlds. World Labs believes its software will be useful for individuals in various fields including artists, designers, developers, and engineers.

“This is such a foundational technology,” Li stated in an interview on Friday with Bloomberg Television. “It has implications in a wide range of use cases,” including, eventually, robotics and manufacturing. Li co-directs Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered AI and co-founded the company along with Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, and Ben Mildenhall, each with significant AI experience. The company reportedly employs 20 workers.

Li hinted at the start-up’s goals in a TED talk in April, suggesting that the “urge to act is innate to all beings with spatial intelligence, which links perception with action.” She emphasized, “If we want to advance AI beyond its current capabilities, we want more than AI that can see and talk. We want AI that can do.”

Her previous accomplishments substantially contributed to today’s AI innovations. She played a pivotal role in the academic project ImageNet, which was released in 2006 and consists of over 15 million images that facilitated advancements in object recognition.

“I believe spatial intelligence is the next North Star for me,” she expressed. “It will change the course of AI.”