New AI godmother startup valued at $1 billion

Renowned computer scientist Fei-Fei Li, known as the “godmother of artificial intelligence,” founded World Labs, a startup that has reached a valuation of over a billion dollars in just four months.

Image source: Kimberly White/Getty Images for WIRED

Fei-Fei Li is known for her contributions to computer vision, a field of AI dedicated to helping machines interpret and understand visual information. She led the development of ImageNet, a large visual database used for research in visual object recognition. From 2017 to 2018, Lee led the AI ​​department at Google Cloud, and currently advises the White House AI working group, The Verge reports, citing the Financial Times.

Lee’s new World Labs project aims to use human-like visual processing to make AI capable of advanced reasoning—something that OpnenAI is trying to do with its ChatGPT generative AI model. An unnamed venture capitalist familiar with Li’s work told the Financial Times: “World Labs is developing a model that can analyze the three-dimensional physical world, so it’s about the size of objects, where they are and what happens to them at a certain moment.”

The startup has already completed two rounds of financing, the last of which amounted to about $100 million with the support of such well-known venture funds as Andreessen Horowitz and the AI ​​fund Radical Ventures, of which, by the way, Fei-Fei Li became a partner last year.

In her recent TED talk in April, Lee outlined the direction of research her startup will be working on. This is an algorithm that can extrapolate images and text into a three-dimensional environment and, based on past trends, predict future data using the concept of “spatial intelligence.” Experts note that this technology could have a significant impact on areas such as robotics, augmented reality, virtual reality and computer vision.

The investment in World Labs reflects a general trend today in which venture capitalists are eager to join high-profile and ambitious AI projects, inspired by the unexpected success of OpenAI, whose project quickly reached a valuation of more than $80 billion.