AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li's World Labs raises $1B in funding (finance.yahoo.com)

Fei-Fei Li's World Labs has successfully raised $1 billion to enhance its development of "spatial intelligence," a cutting-edge approach in AI that enables machines to understand and interact with the three-dimensional world. Investors in this round include notable chip manufacturers like AMD and Nvidia, along with Autodesk, which contributed $200 million and will provide advisory support. Though World Labs has not disclosed a valuation, reports suggest it was discussing a valuation around $5 billion earlier in the year. The significance of this funding lies in the promise of spatial intelligence to transform how AI systems operate, particularly in augmented and virtual reality applications, as well as robotics. World Labs is working on foundational models that can process and reason about the 3D environments, akin to the "world models" being explored by Google DeepMind and others. Their Marble multimodal model exemplifies this capability by generating 3D worlds from text or images, marking a substantial leap beyond traditional 2D data interpretations. With AI thought leaders like Li and emerging projects from others in the field, this funding underscores a pivotal moment in advancing AI's engagement with real-world complexities.