Initial financing for World laboratories The company was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise Associates and Radical Ventures. Other investors included AMD Ventures, Intel Capital and Nvidia’s NVentures.
World Labs declined to share its assessment.
Li, one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in AI for 2023, led AI at Google Cloud from 2017 to 2018, served on Twitter’s board of directors and has worked as an advisor to policymakers, including at the White House.
The Stanford University professor is widely known as the “godmother of AI,” a nickname that alludes to the three “godfather” winners of the 2018 Turing Award, the world’s highest prize in computing, for their advances in AI technology.
Li made a name for himself in AI by developing ImageNet, a large-scale image dataset that helped usher in a generation of machine vision technologies that could reliably identify objects for the first time.
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Reuters previously reported that Li was working in stealth mode on a AI Home that could turn ideas into 3D environments. Other founders of World Labs include computer vision researchers Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner and Ben Mildenhall. While commercially available generative AI models can produce stunning text and photographs, World Labs is focused on “spatial intelligence,” or the ability to reason about how the 3D world works, Li told Reuters. Spatial intelligence The models could be used in the future for augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) or robotics, he said.
“The images and videos we’ve seen so far from generative AI models don’t give us a complete picture of how a 3D world is built,” Li said in an interview with Mildenhall.
This sense is crucial to unlocking broader reasoning capabilities in AI systems, he said. This would prevent the emergence of “hallucinations,” such as hands with the wrong number of fingers.
“How we understand the structure of the world, whether imagined or real, will fundamentally be a piece of this AI puzzle,” Li said.
The San Francisco-based startup, which has 20 employees, will train basic models that its founders call “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 underlies OpenAI’s viral chatbot ChatGPT, Li said. However, the transformer won’t be the “be-all and end-all” of their models, he said, suggesting they will incorporate other elements as well.
Li will continue his work at Stanford University’s Human-Centered AI Institute while developing the startup.
World Labs is Li’s second foray into the business world. As a student at Princeton University, Li borrowed money to buy a dry cleaning business for his parents and spent weekends working there, he said in his memoir.
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