World Labs
2024-09-27
World Labs: a spatial intelligence AI company building Large World Models (LWMs) to perceive, generate, and interact with the 3D world. 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.
World Labs was founded by visionary AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li along with Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, and Ben Mildenhall; each a world-renowned technologist in computer vision and graphics. We are bringing together the most formidable slate of pixel talent ever assembled - from AI research to systems engineering to product design - creating a tight feedback loop between our spatially intelligent foundation models and products that will empower our users.
Where We're Going
AI is an emerging field with the potential to transform our world. However, we view it not as singularly unique but instead as part of the continuous progress of technology, continuing humanity's centuries-old quest to empower people with increasingly sophisticated tools. We believe that humans are innovative, curious, and creative; science and technology are both manifestations and drivers of these impulses. Propelling AI forward with spatial intelligence will also propel forward both individuals and humanity as a whole.
Toward this goal, World Labs will develop spatially intelligent Large World Models (LWMs) that can understand and reason about the 3D world from images and other modalities. Over time, we expect to train increasingly powerful models with broader capabilities that can be applied in a variety of domains, working alongside people.
Initially we will focus on generating 3D worlds without limits - creating and editing virtual spaces complete with physics, semantics, and control. We hope this will unlock new capabilities for creative users and professionals such as artists, designers, developers, and engineers. It will also allow anyone to imagine and create their own worlds, expanding the potential of generative AI from 2D images and videos to 3D worlds.
Who We're Building With
These are ambitious goals, so we are building an ambitious company to tackle them. Our team has a strong research background, but we are not motivated by exploration for its own sake. Instead, we believe that now is a unique moment where rapid scientific progress has thinned the barrier between research and applications. We aim to seize this opportunity, focusing on the entire throughline from research to engineering to product to people.
We've already made promising strides, but we have a long way to go. We thank our investors for their early support on our journey. To date we have raised more than $230M in total funding led by Martin Casado and Sarah Wang of Andreessen Horowitz, Scott Sandell of NEA, and Jordan Jacobs of Radical Ventures. Other investors include individuals Marc Benioff, Jim Breyer, Ron Conway, Jeff Dean, Geoffrey Hinton, Reid Hoffman, Andrej Karpathy, Sound Ventures co-founder Ashton Kutcher, Eric Schmidt, Ram Shriram, Anne Wojcicki, and the late Susan Wojcicki; as well as Adobe Ventures, AMD Ventures, Databricks Ventures, NVentures, the venture capital arm of NVIDIA, Salesforce Ventures, and Shinrai Investments LLC. We are grateful for their partnership.
References:
https://x.com/drfeifei/status/1834584286932181300
https://www.wired.com/story/plaintext-the-godmother-of-ai-wants-everyone-to-be-a-world-builder
