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Fei-Fei Li, a synthetic intelligence specialist at Stanford University, has quietly built a billion-dollar start-up in only 4 months, joining all the tech industry's fierce race to commercialize the technology.
Li, a pc scientist dubbed the “godmother of artificial intelligence,” founded an organization called World Labs in April, three people acquainted with the move said.
The startup has already accomplished two rounds of funding and received money from top tech investors comparable to Andreessen Horowitz and AI fund Radical Ventures, two of the people acquainted with the matter said. Those investors valued the corporate at greater than $1 billion.
According to one in every of the people, World Labs raised about $100 million in its latest funding round.
Li didn’t reply to multiple requests for comment. Andreessen Horowitz and Radical Ventures declined to comment.
World Labs is the most recent AI startup to secure major investment after OpenAI released the chatbot ChatGPT in November 2022, sparking an explosion of investor interest in generative AI.
In the last three months alone, investors have pumped greater than $27 billion into US AI startups, in response to PitchBook. That's about half of all startup financing during that period.
Li founded World Labs while on a partial leave of absence from Stanford, where she co-directs the California university's Human-Centered AI Institute, a research lab founded in 2019 with the goal of using the emerging technology to enhance the standard of human life.
Her company will attempt to create “spatial intelligence” in AI by developing human-like processing of visual data. Li gave a TED talk in Vancouver in April about this field of research, which described the potential of machines to know and navigate three-dimensional spaces.
The work would represent a serious breakthrough in AI, helping it interact with real-world environments and advance more sophisticated autonomous systems.
Li rose to prominence in AI by developing ImageNet, a big image dataset that advanced the way in which computer vision technology can discover objects. Li led AI at Google Cloud from 2017 to 2018, served on the board of Twitter from 2020 to 2022, and is an advisor to the White House AI Task Force.
Large databases of labeled images have been critical to recent breakthroughs in AI, training self-driving cars to navigate their environments and AI models to appropriately discover objects based on visual cues.
Li's vision for spatial intelligence is much more ambitious: he desires to train a machine that’s able to understanding the complex physical world and the interactions of objects in it.
“(World Labs) is developing a model that understands the three-dimensional physical world; essentially the size of objects, where things are and what they do,” said a enterprise capitalist acquainted with Li's work.
Other AI groups attracting investor interest include some developing intelligent robots that may understand and manipulate their physical environment.
Skild, which is constructing a “general-purpose brain for diverse robot incarnations,” was valued at $1.5 billion last week after raising $300 million in funding from SoftBank, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' investment fund, Lightspeed Venture Partners and others.
