Close Menu
Technology Mag

    Subscribe to Updates

    Get the latest creative news from FooBar about art, design and business.

    What's Hot

    How WIRED Analyzed the Epstein Video

    July 31, 2025

    Join Us for WIRED’s AI Power Summit

    July 31, 2025

    What Your Nighttime Breathing Says About Your Health

    July 31, 2025
    Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram
    Subscribe
    Technology Mag
    Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram YouTube
    • Home
    • News
    • Business
    • Games
    • Gear
    • Reviews
    • Science
    • Security
    • Trending
    • Press Release
    Technology Mag
    Home » The Godmother of AI Wants Everyone to Be a World Builder
    Business

    The Godmother of AI Wants Everyone to Be a World Builder

    News RoomBy News RoomSeptember 17, 20244 Mins Read
    Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Reddit WhatsApp Email

    According to market-fixated tech pundits and professional skeptics, the artificial intelligence bubble has popped, and winter’s back. Fei-Fei Li isn’t buying that. In fact, Li—who earned the sobriquet the “godmother of AI”—is betting on the contrary. She’s on a part-time leave from Stanford University to cofound a company called World Labs. While current generative AI is language-based, she sees a frontier where systems construct complete worlds with the physics, logic, and rich detail of our physical reality. It’s an ambitious goal, and despite the dreary nabobs who say progress in AI has hit a grim plateau, World Labs is on the funding fast track. The startup is perhaps a year away from having a product—and it’s not clear at all how well it will work when and if it does arrive—but investors have pitched in $230 million and are reportedly valuing the nascent startup at a billion dollars.

    Roughly a decade ago, Li helped AI turn a corner by creating ImageNet, a bespoke database of digital images that allowed neural nets to get significantly smarter. She feels that today’s deep-learning models need a similar boost if AI is to create actual worlds, whether they’re realistic simulations or totally imagined universes. Future George R.R. Martins might compose their dreamed-up worlds as prompts instead of prose, which you might then render and wander around in. “The physical world for computers is seen through cameras, and the computer brain behind the cameras,” Li says. “Turning that vision into reasoning, generation, and eventual interaction involves understanding the physical structure, the physical dynamics of the physical world. And that technology is called spatial intelligence.” World Labs calls itself a spatial intelligence company, and its fate will help determine whether that term becomes a revolution or a punch line.

    Li has been obsessing over spatial intelligence for years. While everyone was going gaga over ChatGPT, she and a former student, Justin Johnson, were excitedly gabbling in phone calls about AI’s next iteration. “The next decade will be about generating new content that takes computer vision, deep learning, and AI out of the internet world, and gets them embedded in space and time,” says Johnson, who is now an assistant professor at the University of Michigan.

    Li decided to start a company early in 2023, after a dinner with Martin Casado, a pioneer in virtual networking who is now a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. That’s the VC firm notorious for its near-messianic embrace of AI. Casado sees AI as being on a similar path as computer games, which started with text, moved to 2D graphics, and now have dazzling 3D imagery. Spatial intelligence will drive the change. Eventually, he says, “You could take your favorite book, throw it into a model, and then you literally step into it and watch it play out in real time, in an immersive way,” he says. The first step to making that happen, Casado and Li agreed, is moving from large language models to large world models.

    Li began assembling a team, with Johnson as a cofounder. Casado suggested two more people—one was Christoph Lassner, who had worked at Amazon, Meta’s Reality Labs, and Epic Games. He is the inventor of Pulsar, a rendering scheme that led to a celebrated technique called 3D Gaussian Splatting. That sounds like an indie band at an MIT toga party, but it’s actually a way to synthesize scenes, as opposed to one-off objects. Casado’s other suggestion was Ben Mildenhall, who had created a powerful technique called NeRF—neural radiance fields—that transmogrifies 2D pixel images into 3D graphics. “We took real-world objects into VR and made them look perfectly real,” he says. He left his post as a senior research scientist at Google to join Li’s team.

    One obvious goal of a large world model would be imbuing, well, world-sense into robots. That indeed is in World Labs’ plan, but not for a while. The first phase is building a model with a deep understanding of three dimensionality, physicality, and notions of space and time. Next will come a phase where the models support augmented reality. After that the company can take on robotics. If this vision is fulfilled, large world models will improve autonomous cars, automated factories, and maybe even humanoid robots.

    Share. Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn WhatsApp Reddit Email
    Previous ArticleTrump is hawking tokens for a crypto project he still hasn’t explained
    Next Article Amazon’s next Prime Day sale is happening on October 8th and 9th

    Related Posts

    Join Us for WIRED’s AI Power Summit

    July 31, 2025

    Meta’s AI Recruiting Campaign Finds a New Target

    July 30, 2025

    Meta Is Going to Let Job Candidates Use AI During Coding Tests

    July 30, 2025

    The Real Demon Inside ChatGPT

    July 29, 2025

    Programmers Aren’t So Humble Anymore—Maybe Because Nobody Codes in Perl

    July 29, 2025

    60 Italian Mayors Want to Be the Unlikely Solution to Self-Driving Cars in Europe

    July 29, 2025
    Our Picks

    Join Us for WIRED’s AI Power Summit

    July 31, 2025

    What Your Nighttime Breathing Says About Your Health

    July 31, 2025

    Google’s Newest AI Model Acts like a Satellite to Track Climate Change

    July 31, 2025

    Steam and Itch.io Are Pulling ‘Porn’ Games. Critics Say It’s a Slippery Slope to More Censorship

    July 31, 2025
    • Facebook
    • Twitter
    • Pinterest
    • Instagram
    • YouTube
    • Vimeo
    Don't Miss
    News

    Epic’s Game Store is bringing Fortnite back to Google Play

    By News RoomJuly 31, 2025

    Following an appeals court victory on Thursday, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney tweeted that “the Epic…

    Tesla’s ‘robotaxi’ rides in San Francisco have a human at the wheel

    July 31, 2025

    The 15 best back-to-school deals for college students

    July 31, 2025

    Thumby Color micro-review: a delightfully tiny GBA clone that doesn’t play Nintendo

    July 31, 2025
    Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram Pinterest
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms of use
    • Advertise
    • Contact
    © 2025 Technology Mag. All Rights Reserved.

    Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.