Andreessen Horowitz, Ashton Kutcher and Nvidia are among the investors.
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By Rachel Metz
September 13, 2024 at 19:00 GMT+7
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Artificial intelligence pioneer Fei-Fei Li has raised $230 million from a star-studded list of investors for a new AI startup called World Labs, which officially launches Friday.
The company aims to build software that can use images and other data to make decisions about the three-dimensional world, building what it calls “large world models.” The funding is a sign of investors’ continued appetite for technology that pushes the boundaries of AI, as well as the draw of the field’s biggest names.
The new funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Radical Ventures, a Canadian VC firm where Li is also a scientific partner. World Labs declined to disclose its valuation.
A number of well-known figures in AI also invested, including Jeff Dean, chief scientist of Google DeepMind, and Geoffrey Hinton, a former Google AI researcher known for his work to advance the field of machine learning. (Hinton is an investor in Radical Ventures.) Nvidia Corp.’s venture arm has also backed the company.
Other individual investors include VC and actor Ashton Kutcher, Salesforce Inc. Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
The San Francisco-based startup initially plans to generate virtual 3-D spaces where variables such as physics can be controlled by users; the company will also let people create their own 3-D “worlds.” World Labs thinks its software will be useful for people in a range of occupations including artists, designers, developers and engineers.
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“This is such a foundational technology,” Li said in an interview Friday with Bloomberg Television. “It has implications in a wide range of use cases,” including, eventually, robotics and manufacturing.
Li, co-director of Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered AI, started the company with three other founders — Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner and Ben Mildenhall, all with extensive experience in AI. The company said it currently has 20 employees.
Li foreshadowed the startup’s goals in a TED talk in April, saying that the “urge to act is innate to all beings with spatial intelligence, which links perception with action.”
She added: “If we want to advance AI beyond its current capabilities, we want more than AI that can see and talk. We want AI that can do.”
Li’s earlier work paved the way for many of the current innovations in AI. She was part of the team behind the academic project ImageNet, a database of over 15 million images released in 2006 that helped lead to advances in the ways computers recognize objects in images.
“I do believe spatial intelligence is the next North Star for me,” she told Bloomberg on Friday. “It will change the course of AI.”
(Updated with quotes from Li beginning in 7th paragraph.)