World Labs has announced that it has managed to raise investment funds for $230 million, which will be used to develop large world models.
The company clarifies that the mentioned models perceive, generate, and interact with the three-dimensional world. A message posted on the World Labs LinkedIn account notes that the firm aims to lift artificial intelligence models from the 2D plane of pixels to full 3D worlds, both virtual and real. The company also intends to endow these functional systems with spatial intelligence, which in terms of capabilities is similar to the corresponding abilities of the human mind.
World Labs was founded by artificial intelligence pioneer Fei-Fei Li and computer vision and graphics technologists Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, and Ben Mildenhall.
In a post published on the company’s blog, it is noted that spatially intelligent models will allow artists, designers, developers, and engineers to imagine and create their virtual spaces with physics, semantics, and control. The firm also expects that over time it will train more and more powerful models with boarder capabilities.
The World Labs funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, and Radical Ventures.
Andreessen Horowitz’s general partners Martin Casado and Sarah Wang say that the company’s goal is to build a true 3D representation of the world that the user can walk, interact with and build upon. According to them, an appropriate representation of the real world or the generated virtual world will allow consumers to reason about physics and cause-and-effect relationships.
As we have reported earlier, Ilya Sutskever Raises $1 Billion for His New AI Company.