In January, A.I. pioneer Fei-Fei Li began a two-year leave from her position at Stanford University and updated her LinkedIn to describe her current work as “something new.” That new venture has been revealed to be a startup called World Labs that has already achieved a $1 billion valuation merely four months after launching, as reported by the Financial Times.
The computer scientist’s startup reportedly counts venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Radical Ventures among its investors. Andreessen Horowitz, which is betting big on A.I. by setting aside billions of dollars for the technology, and Radical Ventures, a machine learning-focused VC firm, belong to a growing group of investors eager to take advantage of the A.I. revolution. In the second quarter, VC funding for A.I. companies doubled from a year ago to $24 billion, according to Crunchbase.
Li, who is often dubbed the “Godmother of A.I.” for her contributions towards the technology’s development, is a partner at Radical Ventures and in 2016 spent several months as Andreessen Horowitz’s professor in residence. She did not respond to requests for comment from Observer.
Li co-directs the Human-Centered A.I. Institute at Stanford, which aims to utilize generative A.I. to improve the human condition. She has counted the likes of Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI who headed A.I. efforts at Tesla (TSLA) and recently launched an education-focused A.I. startup, among her students. Before joining the university in 2009, her work at Princeton University led to the breakthrough development of ImageNet, a database of 15 million images used to visually train computers. Li also previously acted as a Google vice president and chief scientist of A.I. and machine learning at Google Cloud between 2017 and 2018, in addition to having served as a board director at Twitter and an advisor to the White House on tech policies.
Through her new company, Li is now working on creating spatial intelligence—a concept she delved into during an April TED Talk. “If we want to advance A.I. beyond its current capabilities, we want more than A.I. that can see and talk. We want A.I. that can do,” said Li during the talk. To illustrate the concept of spatial intelligence, she pointed to an image of a cat pushing over a glass. “In the last split second, your brain looked at the geometry of this glass, its place in 3D space, its relationship with the table, the cat and everything else, and you can predict what’s going to happen next,” she explained. “The urge to act is innate to all beings with spatial intelligence, which links perception with action.”
Taking on such innovative projects requires funding, something that A.I. academics and the institutions they work for often lack. “We do not have the compute resources, we do not have the data, and more and more of our talent is going into the private sector,” Li told Bloomberg last year while discussing the inability of universities to train expensive A.I. models. Noting an imbalance in funding between the public and private sectors, the latter of which is flush with venture capital for A.I. startups, Li said she had met with President Joe Biden last summer and urged for an aggressive push in investments towards public A.I. projects and research.
In the case of World Labs, no push is needed. The startup has held two funding rounds since April and raised about $100 million during the most recent one, according to the Financial Times.
