news

author: li dan

source: hard ai

artificial intelligence (ai) pioneer and ai scientist fei-fei li is in the headlines again. this time, she attracted media attention because of a new ai startup called world labs, which was backed by top silicon valley venture capital firms andreessen horowitz, nvidia and other big-name sponsors when it first came out.

world labs was officially established on friday, september 13th, eastern time. it currently has 20 employees. its founders are fei-fei li and several well-known experts in the fields of computer vision and computer graphics, including justin johnson, christoph lassne, and ben mildenhall.

according to the official website of world labs, it is a spatial intelligence ai company dedicated to creating a "large world model" (lwm) for the perception, generation and interaction of the 3d world. the company's goal is to

elevate ai models from the 2d pixel plane to a complete 3d world, including both virtual and real worlds, and give these worlds the same rich spatial intelligence as the human world.

world labs will develop spatial intelligence lwm, a model that can understand and reason about the 3d world from images and other modalities. over time, the company hopes to train increasingly powerful models that can be applied in a variety of fields and work alongside humans.

world labs said that the company will first focus on generating 3d worlds, creating and editing virtual spaces with physics, semantics and control, hoping that it will unlock new features for creative users and professionals such as artists, designers, developers and engineers. such spaces will also allow any user to imagine and create their own world, extending the potential of generative ai from 2d images and videos to 3d worlds.

the founding team of world labs said that they established the company to achieve the above ambitious goals. the team has made gratifying progress, but there is still a long way to go. in addition to having a strong scientific research background, world labs is also supported by many ai professionals and venture capital.

world labs revealed that as of friday, the company had raised a total of $230 million, and listed a series of well-known investors, including martin casado and sarah wang, general partners of andreessen horowitz, scott sandell, chief investment officer of new enterprise associates, and jordan jacobs, managing partner of radical ventures, a canadian venture capital firm where fei-fei li serves as a scientific partner.

institutions participating in the financing include nvidia's venture capital arm nventures, amd and adobe's respective venture capital institutions adobe ventures and amd ventures, databricks ventures and shinrai investments llc.

individual investors who participated in the financing include well-known bigwigs in the ai ​​field and the entire silicon valley, such as jeff dean, chief scientist of deepmind, an ai research institute under google, geoffrey hinton, a former google ai researcher known for promoting machine learning, eric schmidt, former ceo of google, ashton kutcher, co-founder of sound ventures, marc benioff, co-founder of salesforce, reid hoffman, co-founder of linkedin, the late former ceo of youtube susan wojcicki, and anne wojcicki, ceo of 23andme.

according to media reports, world labs plans to create a large world model that uses data such as images to generate a 3d "world" that users can interact with and control. the company initially plans to generate a virtual 3d space where users can control the variables of the space, and also plans to allow people to create their own 3d "world". world labs believes that its software will be useful to a range of professionals such as artists, designers, developers and engineers.

commentators believe that world labs' financing shows that investors continue to be interested in technologies that break the boundaries of ai, and also reflects the startup's attractiveness to industry leaders.

although world labs did not disclose the company's valuation, it was reported in july this year that fei-fei li would establish a startup company valued at us$1 billion.