World Labs, a startup co-founded by Stanford A.I. pioneer Fei-Fei Li earlier this year that quickly grabbed the attention of high-profile investors, has remained relatively quiet on its products—until now. The startup yesterday (Dec. 3) provided a glimpse of one of its early projects, which takes the form of virtual 3D scenes generated from a 2D image. “This will change how we make movies, games, simulators and other digital manifestations of our physical worlds,” said World Labs in a blog post accompanied by interactive examples of its 3D worlds. The preview shines a light on Li’s larger efforts to develop A.I. models that have “spatial intelligence” and can understand and interact with the real world.
Based on images of landscapes, urban scenes and even artwork from painters like Vincent van Gogh and Edward Hopper, World Labs creates entire 3D worlds that users can explore—albeit with some barriers, such as a limit on how large the interactive area is. According to the startup, this 3D content provides more control than typical 2D A.I. content, as it allows users to adjust aspects like field of depth or play with camera dolly zooms.
Often referred to as the “Godmother of A.I.” for her contributions to the field, Li in the 2000s played a large role in the release of ImageNet, a database of 15 million images that helped kickstart pivotal advances in machine learning. She is currently on partial leave from her role as co-director of Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered A.I. to work on World Labs, which Li established earlier this year alongside fellow A.I. researchers Justin Johnson, Ben Mildenhall and Christoph Lassner.
The startup in September raised some $230 million in a round led by Radical Ventures, a Canadian venture capital firm where Li serves as a partner, with the participation of Andreessen Horowitz and NEA. Other World Lab investors include “A.I. godfather” Geoffrey Hinton, former Google (GOOGL) CEO Eric Schmidt, LinkedIn (LNKD) co-founder Reid Hoffman, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Google’s chief scientist Jeff Dean, actor-turned-investor Ashton Kutcher, and Nvidia (NVDA)’s venture capital arm, NVentures.
World Labs’ primary goal is developing the ability to take action with vision or perception within A.I. models—a type of intelligence that took 540 million years to evolve in the human brain. “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,” Li said during a TED Talk in April.
This week’s initial preview is just an early look at what World Labs hopes to eventually accomplish. The company said it has offered early access to its technology to digital content creators like Eric Solorio and Brittani Natali. “We are hard at work improving the size and fidelity of our generated worlds, and experimenting with new ways for users to interact with them,” said World Labs.
