World Labs, a spatial intelligence company, has announced a funding round of $230m to advance the development of AI models capable of perceiving and interacting with the 3D world.
This funding round was led by investors including Martin Casado and Sarah Wang from Andreessen Horowitz, Scott Sandell of NEA, and Jordan Jacobs of Radical Ventures.
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Corporate venture capital arms like Adobe Ventures, AMD Ventures, Databricks Ventures, NVentures of NVIDIA, and Shinrai Investments LLC have also participated.
Founded by AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li and computer vision and graphics experts Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, and Ben Mildenhall, San Francisco-based World Labs aims to create large world models (LWMs).
These models will be designed to understand and reason about the 3D world through images and various other modalities.
In a blog post, World Labs said: “We aim to lift AI models from the 2D plane of pixels to full 3D worlds- both virtual and real – endowing them with spatial intelligence as rich as our own. Human spatial intelligence evolved over millennia; but in this time of extraordinary progress, we see the opportunity to imbue AI with this ability in the near term.”
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By GlobalDataThe company’s vision is to train increasingly powerful models with expansive capabilities that can be applied across multiple domains, augmenting human work.
Initially, World Labs will concentrate on generating limitless 3D worlds, enabling the creation and editing of virtual spaces complete with physics, semantics, and control mechanisms.
This is expected to open up new possibilities available to creative professionals, including artists, designers, developers, and engineers, by allowing them to imagine and construct their own worlds.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Li said: “This is such a foundational technology. It has implications in a wide range of use cases. If we want to advance AI beyond its current capabilities, we want more than AI that can see and talk. We want AI that can do. I do believe spatial intelligence is the next North Star for me. It will change the course of AI.”
The investment round also attracted a cohort of individual investors, such as Marc Benioff, Jim Breyer, Ron Conway, Jeff Dean, Geoffrey Hinton, Reid Hoffman, Andrej Karpathy, Ashton Kutcher of Sound Ventures, Eric Schmidt, Ram Shriram, Anne Wojcicki, and the late Susan Wojcicki.
