Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs raises $1bn to advance spatial intelligence

The spherical was backed by massive names together with Nvidia, AMD and Autodesk.

Fei-Fei Li’s AI start-up World Labs has raised $1bn to advance spatial intelligence – successfully, generative AI “world fashions” able to interacting with complicated digital worlds.

Final November, World Labs launched its first industrial product known as Marble that generates 3D digital worlds from picture or textual content prompts.

With this new funding, the start-up desires to proceed constructing AI fashions to “revolutionise storytelling, creativity, robotics [and] scientific discovery”.

The spherical was backed by massive title buyers together with Nvidia; AMD; Constancy Administration and Analysis Firm; Autodesk; Emerson Collective; and Sea.

The beginning-up didn’t disclose its post-funding valuation, nonetheless, experiences from final month estimated it to finish up at $5bn. Autodesk has invested $200m in World Labs as a part of the spherical, and with the funding, has additionally taken an advisory function within the start-up.

“Autodesk has lengthy helped folks assume spatially and remedy real-world issues and, collectively, we share a transparent goal – constructing bodily AI that augments human creativity and places extra highly effective instruments within the fingers of designers, builders and creators,” Li stated.

Li is sometimes called the ‘godmother of AI’, due to her groundbreaking work on ImageNet. Her start-up World Labs got here out of stealth in 2024, and was valued at round $1bn after a $230m funding spherical that included Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia’s enterprise arm and Radical Ventures, the place she is herself a scientific companion.

World Labs describes itself as a “spatial intelligence firm, constructing frontier fashions that may understand, generate, cause and work together with the 3D world”. It describes its AI merchandise as “massive world fashions”.

Li known as AI a “civilisational know-how” in an interview with Bloomberg late final 12 months. “I consider spatial intelligence is as crucial [as] – and complementary to – language intelligence,” she stated.

The World Labs co-founder is a professor on the pc science division at Stanford College and has served as director of the college’s AI Lab. She is presently the co-director of the Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute and has beforehand served because the chief scientist at Google Cloud.

Don’t miss out on the information it’s essential to succeed. Join the Day by day Transient, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech information.

Fei-Fei Li, 2024. Picture: © Steve Jurvetson by way of Flickr (CC BY 2.0)