Stanford University’s artificial intelligence leader and the ‘godmother of AI’, Fei-Fei Li, has built a billion-dollar AI start-up called World Labs in just four months and secured significant funding from top tech investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Radical Ventures.
The company’s recent funding was $100 million, which increased its valuation in the market, making it one of the most prominent AI startups that people must watch out for, along with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Li founded the venture in April, while on a partial leave from Stanford, where she is the co-director of the university’s Human-Centered AI Institute.
In a Ted Talk in April, Li said that the World Labs’ vision is to create ‘spatial intelligence’ in AI, using human-like processing of visual data to make it capable of advanced reasoning. Currently, the company is working on developing a model capable of understanding 3D physical environments.
Li is widely known for her contributions to computer vision, a branch of AI that helps machines comprehend visual information. She has invented ImageNet, a visual dataset for advancing computer vision. She was also the head of AI at Google Cloud from 2017 to 2018 and is currently the AI research resource task force member at the White House in the USA.
If this research goes the way Li plans, it can improve operations in various fields such as robotics, augmented reality, virtual reality, and computer vision. It may also be able to transform the healthcare and manufacturing industries.
