‘Godmother of AI’ Fei-Fei Li builds $1bn start-up in 4 months

Stanford University’s artificial intelligence leader Fei-Fei Li has quietly built a billion-dollar start-up in just four months, joining the fierce race across the tech industry to commercialise the technology.

Li, a computer scientist who has been dubbed the “godmother of AI”, created a company called World Labs in April, according to three people with knowledge of the move.

The start-up has already raised two rounds of funding, receiving money from top tech investors including Andreessen Horowitz and AI fund Radical Ventures, according to two of the people. Those investors have valued the business at more than $1bn.

World Labs raised about $100mn in its latest fundraising round, according to one of the people.

Li did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Andreessen Horowitz and Radical Ventures declined to comment.

World Labs is the latest AI start-up to secure large investment following OpenAI’s release of the ChatGPT chatbot in November 2022, which led to an explosion of investor interest in generative AI.

In the past three months alone, investors have poured more than $27bn into US AI start-ups, according to PitchBook. That accounts for about half of all start-up funding in that period.

Li started World Labs while on partial leave from Stanford, where she co-directs the Californian university’s Human-Centered AI institute, a research lab launched in 2019 to use the fledgling technology to advance the human condition.

Her business will attempt to create “spatial intelligence” in AI by developing humanlike processing of visual data. Li gave a TED talk in Vancouver in April about this field of research that described the potential for machines to understand and navigate three-dimensional spaces.

The work would represent a big breakthrough in AI, helping it to interact with real-world environments and advancing more sophisticated autonomous systems.

Li rose to prominence in AI by developing ImageNet, a large image data set that progressed how computer vision technology can identify objects. Li led AI at Google Cloud from 2017 to 2018, was a board director at Twitter from 2020 to 2022 and is an adviser to the White House task force on AI.

Vast repositories of labelled images have been essential for recent AI breakthroughs, training self-driving cars to navigate their environment and AI models to correctly identify objects from visual prompts.

Li’s vision for spatial intelligence is even more ambitious: training a machine capable of understanding the complex physical world and the interrelation of objects within it.

“[World Labs] is developing a model that understands the three-dimensional physical world; essentially the dimensions of objects, where things are and what they do,” said one venture capitalist with knowledge of Li’s work.

Among the other AI groups attracting investor interest are a number developing intelligent robots that can understand and manipulate their physical surroundings.

Skild, which is building a “general-purpose brain for a diverse embodiment of robots”, was valued at $1.5bn last week after receiving $300mn in funding from SoftBank, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s investment fund, Lightspeed Venture Partners and others.