The AI ​​startup of Stanford University professor Feifei Li, often called the ‘godmother of artificial intelligence (AI),’ was valued at $1 billion (about 1.4 trillion won) just 4 months after its establishment. Together with her name value and the industry’s outlook, the corporate rose to unicorn status at a record speed.
The Verge reported on the seventeenth (local time) that World Labs, founded in April, recently attracted $100 million (about 140 billion won) from major investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Radical Ventures, and was recognized as having a company value of $1 billion. Following seed investment 4 months ago, it has already succeeded in funding twice.
Professor Lee is credited with leading the birth of vision AI by constructing ‘ImageNet’ consisting of 15 million images in 2010. Based on this, the CNN (convolutional neural network) called ‘AlexNet’ was born in 2013, and AI began to develop in earnest.
From 2017 to 2018, he led AI research at Google Cloud, and currently advises the White House AI Task Force. He can be the co-director of Stanford University’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), which was established with the intention of developing human-centered AI. He has currently applied for leave from 2024 to the tip of 2025 to ascertain an organization.
WorldLabs goals to show AI ‘spatial intelligence’ by developing human-like visual data processing technology.
Spatial intelligence is AI that understands the physical world, resembling the scale of objects, the situation of objects, and the energy of objects, and is taken into account a technique to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI). Through this, AI may have the power to realize knowledge of space through vision and use it in each day life, just as humans do.
This field has recently been the topic of intensive research by major AI firms. Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI, etc. are all specializing in this field. It’s because it is taken into account considered one of the ways to realize artificial general intelligence (AGI) by overcoming the restrictions of existing large language models (LLMs).
Nonetheless, the precise business details and follow-up schedule of World Labs haven’t been disclosed. Nonetheless, Professor Lee appeared on the TED conference last April and revealed that he was researching spatial intelligence.
Also in May, Reuters first reported Professor Lee’s startup establishment.
Reporter Park Chan cpark@aitimes.com
