‘AI Number’ Fei-Fei Li Builds $1 Billion Start-up in 4 Months

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Stanford University artificial intelligence leader Fei-Fei Li has quietly built a billion-dollar start-up in just four months, joining the fierce race across the tech industry to commercialize the technology.

Li, a computer scientist who has been called the “godmother of AI,” created a company called World Labs in April, according to three people with knowledge of the move.

The startup has already raised two rounds of funding, taking money from major tech investors including Andreessen Horowitz and AI fund Radical Ventures, according to two of the people. These investors have valued the business at more than $1 billion.

World Labs raised about $100 million in its latest fundraising round, according to one of the people.

Li did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Andreessen Horowitz and Radical Ventures declined to comment.

World Labs is the latest AI start-up to secure major investment following OpenAI’s release of chatbot ChatGPT in November 2022, which led to an explosion of investor interest in generative AI.

In the past three months alone, investors have poured more than $27 billion into US AI startups, according to PitchBook. This accounts for about half of all seed funding in that period.

Li started World Labs while on sabbatical from Stanford, where he co-directs the California university’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Institute, a research lab launched in 2019 to use new technology to advance the human condition.

Her business will try to create “spatial intelligence” in AI by developing human processing of visual data. Li gave a TED talk in Vancouver in April about this area of ​​research that described the potential for machines to understand and navigate three-dimensional spaces.

The work would represent a major advance 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 large image dataset that advanced how computer vision technology can identify objects. Li led AI at Google Cloud from 2017 to 2018, was a board director at Twitter from 2020 to 2022, and is an advisor to the White House AI task force.

Vast repositories of labeled images have been central to recent AI breakthroughs, training self-driving cars to navigate their environment, and AI models to correctly identify objects from visual prompts.

Li’s vision for spatial intelligence is even more ambitious: training a machine capable of understanding the complex physical world and the interconnectedness of objects within it.

“[World Labs] is developing a model that understands the three-dimensional physical world; basically the dimensions of objects, where things are and what they do,” said a venture capitalist with knowledge of Li’s work.

Among other AI groups attracting investor interest are a number of developing intelligent robots that can understand and manipulate their physical environment.

Skild, which is building a “general-purpose brain for a diverse incarnation of robots,” was valued at $1.5 billion last week after receiving $300 million in funding from SoftBank, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ investment fund Lightspeed Venture Partners and others.