Fei-Fei Li, the 'Godmother of AI' whose startup is now valued at north of $1 billion, got her start as a dry cleaner (www.businessinsider.com)

Fei‑Fei Li — the Stanford computer-vision pioneer often dubbed the “Godmother of AI” — has launched World Labs, a one‑year‑old startup now valued at over $1 billion. Li, who immigrated from China at 15 and ran her family’s dry‑cleaning shop for seven years to help make ends meet, says that early life experience shaped her resilience and practical orientation toward building tools that interact with the physical world. Her trajectory from ImageNet creator to founder underscores a continuity: curiosity about visual intelligence rooted in real‑world constraints. Technically, World Labs is focused on “world models” — systems that leverage spatial intelligence so AI can perceive, reason about, and act in physical environments, not just process language. Li positions visual information as a crucial foundation for real‑world action, arguing that LLMs trained primarily on text are limited for embodied tasks. The push toward world models aligns with a broader community shift (notably exemplified by researchers like Yann LeCun) toward integrating perception, spatial reasoning, and control. If successful, these models could accelerate the next phase of AI by enabling agents that understand and interact with complex environments rather than merely predicting language.