AI remains fashionable not only in the technology sector, but also economically, as it is being able to attract billions from investors around the world, to the point of making Nvidia the most valuable company in the world.
One of the people who have the most merit in the current situation of the rise of artificial intelligence is the American Fei-Fei Li, computer engineer who is a professor of this subject at Stanford University and former director of Google Cloud.
His breakthroughs in training AI models in computer vision in the early 2010s have earned him the nickname godmother of AI. Currently, Fei-Fei Li is the CEO of World Labs, a startup she co-founded in 2024.
Now, this company has been in the news because it has achieved a huge financing round worth $1 billionas stated in a company statement.
Among the companies that have invested are giants such as Nvidia and AMD, which usually invest large amounts of money in companies related to the AI business such as OpenAI. Autodesk, Emerson Collective, Fidelity Management & Research Company and Sea, among others, have also participated.
What is spatial intelligence and why is it important?
The company seeks to develop foundational models that are capable of perceiving, generating, reasoning and interacting with the three-dimensional world, a concept called spatial intelligence.
This technology seeks to «transform seeing into doing, perceiving into reasoning and imagining into creating», as explained by World Labs itself, which wants to see the theoretical capabilities of AI translated into real benefits.
«We believe that spatial intelligence will open up new forms of storytelling, creativity, design, simulation, and immersive experiences in both the virtual and physical worlds,» the company’s website describes.
Despite not even having 2 years of history, World Labs has already launched its first product on the market: Marble, a multimodal AI model that allows you to create spatially coherent, high-fidelity and persistent three-dimensional worlds from images, videos and text.
Marble initially seems like a product aimed at the creative industry and virtual reality, but World Labs’ purpose and Fei-Fei Li’s resume seem to indicate that they are actually aiming much higher.
Understanding the physical world is a critical aspect for recent advances in multimodal artificial intelligence, which is capable of translating conversations that begin in text format into reality. It may also be important in how autonomous vehicles or robots understand their environment and are able to do more practical things more independently, although depending on your application this can be scary.