AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li reportedly raises $100 million for new spatial intelligence startup

World Labs, a startup founded by prominent artificial intelligence researcher Fei-Fei Li, has reportedly raised around $100 million in funding.

of Financial Times The Post reported on the investment today. World Labs has raised capital in two funding rounds, the most recent of which valued the company at more than $1 billion, according to sources at the Post. The company's investors are said to include Andreessen Horowitz and Radical Ventures, a Toronto-based venture fund where Lee is a science partner.

Li is co-director of Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute and reportedly founded WorldLab in April while on partial leave of absence after previously leading another Stanford machine learning lab, known as SAIL, for five years.

In 2006, Li created ImageNet, a groundbreaking AI training dataset that has served as the foundation for many subsequent machine learning advances. The dataset contains millions of images with annotations that describe the objects they represent. Researchers have used ImageNet as the foundation for numerous machine learning projects, including AlexNet, an early computer vision algorithm that is considered an important precursor to modern AI models.

Li's new company, WorldLab, is reportedly developing a model with so-called spatial intelligence. A venture capitalist familiar with the project told the Financial Times in May that the model would have the ability to understand “how big an object is, where it is and what it does.” Reuters It was reported that World Labs' AI will also be capable of “advanced inference.”

Li discussed the applications of spatial intelligence. TED Talks Researchers say the technology could enable robots to navigate physical spaces more efficiently — for example, hospitals could use autonomous vehicles with spatial intelligence to transport medical supplies.

During his talk, Li said the technology could also ease the task of programming industrial robots. He cited a recent academic project in which researchers demonstrated that an AI-powered robotic arm could perform tasks based on natural language instructions. In the project, a large-scale language model was used to process user instructions.

Today's report doesn't say whether the AI ​​World Labs is developing is also LLM or uses a different architecture, and it's unclear what use cases the company plans to target with the software.

The cost of developing advanced AI models can reach nine figures in some cases, and hardware costs, especially graphics card purchases, typically make up a large portion of the development budget, so it's likely that a significant portion of World Labs' reported $100 million will go toward AI infrastructure.

The company may be seeking to raise more significant capital to support its research efforts in the future: OpenAI, Anthropic PBC, Mistral AI and other LLM startups have collectively raised tens of billions of dollars from investors over the past few years.

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