Fei-Fei Li, a renowned AI researcher, has raised $230 million for her new startup, World Labs, which focuses on AI that understands the 3D physical world. The funding was led by Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise Associates, and Radical Ventures, with contributions from AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, and NVIDIA’s NVentures.

World Labs, co-founded by Li and three other computer vision experts, aims to develop “spatial intelligence” models that can reason about 3D environments. These models could be used in augmented reality, virtual reality, and robotics. Unlike traditional generative AI, Li’s models will integrate synthetic and real-world data and go beyond transformer-based architectures like those used in OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Li, known for creating ImageNet and her contributions to AI at Google Cloud, will continue her work at Stanford while building the startup. World Labs, based in San Francisco, has a team of 20 employees and is developing what it calls “large world models” (LWMs) to push the boundaries of AI reasoning.

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