AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li reportedly raises $100M for new spatial intelligence startup

Source: Silicon Angle

According to the Financial Times' sources, World Labs raised the capital over two funding rounds, the most recent of which valued the company at more than $1 billion. The company’s investors are said to include Andreessen Horowitz and Radical Ventures, a Toronto-based venture fund where Li is a scientific partner.

Li reportedly launched World Labs in April while on partial leave from Stanford University, where she is the co-director of the Human-Centered AI Institute. She earlier led another Stanford machine learning lab known as SAIL for five years.

World Labs is reportedly developing a model with so-called spatial intelligence. A venture capitalist familiar with the project told the Financial Times that the model will have the ability to understand “the dimensions of objects, where things are and what they do.” In May, Reuters reported that World Labs’ AI will also be capable of “advanced reasoning.”

The cost of developing an advanced AI model can run into the nine figures in some cases. Hardware expenses, notably graphics card purchases, usually account for much of the development budget. As a result, it’s likely that a sizable portion of the $100 million that World Labs has reportedly raised will go towards AI infrastructure.

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