‘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.

Full report : Fei-Fei Li, Stanford computer scientist whose ‘spatial intelligence’ venture gets backing from investors including Andreessen Horowitz.