Renowned computer scientist Fei-Fei Li, often referred to as the “godmother of AI,” has established a startup called World Labs, which has quickly reached a valuation of over $1 billion within just four months, as reported by the Financial Times.
World Labs aims to leverage human-like visual data processing to enhance AI’s capacity for advanced reasoning, as noted by Reuters in May.
The ongoing research to achieve human-like capabilities in AI parallels the efforts of ChatGPT in advancing generative AI technology.
Li is most famous for her notable contributions to computer vision, a subset of AI focused on assisting machines in understanding and interpreting visual information.
She played a key role in creating ImageNet, a comprehensive visual database utilized for research on visual object recognition.
From 2017 to 2018, she led the AI division at Google Cloud and currently provides guidance to the White House task force on AI.
According to an unnamed venture capitalist familiar with Li’s work, World Labs is developing a model that comprehends the three-dimensional physical world, including the dimensions of objects, their locations, and their functions. This information was reported by the Financial Times.
Li, who is a partner at the AI fund Radical Ventures, founded World Labs while on partial leave from Stanford, where she co-directs the university’s Human-Centered AI Institute.
The startup has gone through two funding rounds, with the most recent one raising about $100 million. It is supported by Andreessen Horowitz.
During a Ted Talk in April, Li elaborated on the area of research her startup aims to advance, which focuses on developing algorithms that can realistically convert images and text into three-dimensional environments and then take action based on those predictions, using the concept of “spatial intelligence.”
This advancement could greatly benefit fields such as robotics, augmented reality, virtual reality, and computer vision. If Li’s ambitious plans for these capabilities continue to progress, it could potentially revolutionize industries like healthcare and manufacturing.
The investment in World Labs is part of a larger trend where venture capitalists are showing strong interest in supporting ambitious AI companies, driven in part by the unexpected success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which quickly reached a valuation exceeding $80 billion.
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