Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs speeds up the world model race with Marble, its first commercial product (techcrunch.com)

World Labs, the startup led by Fei‑Fei Li, has launched Marble — its first commercial generative world model — available in freemium and paid tiers. Marble converts text prompts, photos, videos, 3D layouts or panoramas into persistent, editable and downloadable 3D environments (exportable as Gaussian splats, meshes or video). Unlike on‑the‑fly explorers, Marble creates stable digital twins that users can expand, combine via “composer mode,” and fine‑tune with AI‑native editing. Its experimental Chisel editor lets creators block out spatial structure (walls, furniture) and then use text prompts to fill visual detail, decoupling structure from style much like HTML/CSS. The launch accelerates the race for spatially aware AI after World Labs’ $230M raise and a brief beta; it positions the company ahead of many demo‑stage rivals and complements real‑time models by prioritizing persistence, exportability and production workflows. Technical implications include multi‑input reconstruction (multi‑image/video), scene expansion, and asset‑friendly exports for Unity/Unreal — features aimed at gaming, VFX and VR pipelines, and potentially simulation for robotics. Risks and trade‑offs remain: prior beta outputs showed edge morphing and variability in fidelity, and the broader industry still wrestles with IP, energy and quality concerns. Still, Marble marks a concrete step toward Fei‑Fei Li’s vision of “spatial intelligence” — giving machines a robust 3D understanding that could unlock new applications beyond content creation.