The ‘godmother of AI’ has a new startup already worth $1 billion

Fei-Fei Li, the renowned machine idiosyncratic known arsenic the “godmother of AI,” has created a startup dubbed World Labs. In conscionable 4 months, its already valued astatine much than $1 billion, the Financial Times reported.

World Labs hopes to usage human-like processing of ocular information to marque AI susceptible of precocious reasoning, Reuters reported successful May. The probe to marque it human-like, overmuch similar what ChatGPT is trying to bash with generative AI, is inactive ongoing.

Li is champion known for her contributions to machine vision, a subdivision of AI dedicated to helping machines construe and comprehend ocular information. She besides spearheaded the improvement of ImageNet, an extended ocular database utilized for ocular entity designation research. Li headed AI astatine Google Cloud from 2017 to 2018 and presently advises the White House task unit connected AI.

“[World Labs] is processing a exemplary that understands the three-dimensional carnal world; fundamentally the dimensions of objects, wherever things are and what they do,” an anonymous task capitalist with cognition of Li’s enactment told the Financial Times.

The startup has had 2 backing rounds, the latest was astir $100 million, and it’s backed by Andreessen Horowitz and the AI money Radical Ventures (which Li joined arsenic a spouse past year). Li founded World Labs portion connected partial permission from Stanford, wherever she co-directs the university’s Human-Centered AI Institute.

In a Ted Talk successful April, Li further explained the tract of probe her startup volition enactment connected advancing, which involves algorithms susceptible of realistically extrapolating images and substance into three-dimensional environments and acting connected those predictions, utilizing a conception known arsenic “spatial intelligence.” This could bolster enactment successful assorted fields specified arsenic robotics, augmented reality, virtual reality, and machine vision. If these capabilities proceed to beforehand successful the ambitious ways Li plans, it has the imaginable to alteration industries similar healthcare and manufacturing.

The concern successful World Labs reflects a inclination wherever task capitalists eagerly align themselves with ambitious AI companies, spurred by the astonishment occurrence of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which rapidly achieved a valuation exceeding $80 billion.