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Initial funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise

Associates, and Radical Ventures

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World Labs focuses on 'spatial intelligence'

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Li will continue some of her work at Stanford while

building the

startup

By Anna Tong and Katie Paul

Sept 13 (Reuters) - Fei-Fei Li, a leading artificial

intelligence researcher, has raised $230 million for a startup

she and three colleagues founded to make AI technology that can

understand how the three-dimensional physical world works, the

company said on Friday.

Initial funding for World Labs was led jointly by Andreessen

Horowitz, New Enterprise Associates and Radical Ventures. Other

investors included AMD Ventures, Intel Capital

and Nvidia's ( NVDA ) NVentures.

World Labs declined to share its valuation.

Li, one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in AI

in 2023, led AI at Google Cloud from 2017 to 2018, served on

Twitter's board of directors and has done stints advising

policymakers, including at the White House.

The Stanford University professor is widely known as the

"godmother of AI," a moniker alluding to the three "godfather"

winners of the 2018 Turing Award, the computing world's top

prize, for their breakthroughs in AI technology.

Li made her name in AI by developing ImageNet, a large-scale

image dataset that helped usher in a generation of computer

vision technologies that could identify objects reliably for the

first time.

Reuters previously reported that Li was working in stealth

mode on an AI startup that could render ideas into 3D

environments. World Labs' other founders are computer vision

researchers Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner and Ben

Mildenhall.

While commercially available generative AI models can

produce dazzling text and photo outputs, Worlds Labs focuses on

"spatial intelligence," or the ability to reason how the 3D

world works, Li told Reuters. Spatial intelligence models could

be used in the future for augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR)

or robotics, she said.

"The images and videos that you have seen so far coming out

of generative AI models do not give you enough of the whole

sense of how a 3D world is built," Li said in an interview,

along with Mildenhall.

This sense is fundamental to unlocking broader reasoning

capabilities in AI systems, she noted. This would avoid the

rendering of "hallucinations" like hands with the wrong number

of fingers.

"The way we understand the structure of the world, imagined

or real, will fundamentally be a piece of this AI puzzle," Li

said.

The San Francisco-based startup, with 20 employees, will

train foundation models that its founders refer to as "large

world models" or "LWMs." Li said a combination of synthetic and

real-world data will be used to train the models.

The models will use the same transformer-based

architecture that serves as the basis for OpenAI's viral ChatGPT

chatbot, Li said. However, the transformer would not be the

"be-all and end-all" of their models, she said, suggesting they

will incorporate other elements as well.

Li will continue her work at Stanford University's

Human-Centered AI Institute while building the startup.

World Labs is Li's second go-around in entrepreneurship. As

a Princeton University student, Li borrowed money to buy a dry

cleaning business for her parents and spent her weekends working

there, she said in her memoirs.