Fei-Fei Li, the so-called ‘godmother of AI’, is reported to be in talks to raise a major investment that would value her start-up World Labs at $5bn.
We regularly hear about the godfathers of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Yoshua Bengio – the three won the 2018 Turing Award – but computer scientist Fei-Fei Li is also a leading figure in the computer vision and machine learning space, and commonly described as AI’s ‘godmother’, thanks to her groundbreaking work on ImageNet.
Her start-up World Labs came out of stealth in 2024 and was valued at around $1bn via a multimillion-dollar investment round that included Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia’s venture arm and Radical Ventures, where she is herself scientific partner. Now Bloomberg reports that World Labs is in talks on a multimillion-dollar raise that would value the AI start-up at $5bn.
World Labs describes itself as a “spatial intelligence company, building frontier models that can perceive, generate, reason and interact with the 3D world”. It describes its AI products as “large world models”.
Li is a professor at the computer science department at Stanford University and has served as director of the university’s AI Lab. She worked as chief scientist at Google Cloud, until she relinquished her role in 2018 to return to Stanford University full-time.
She is currently the co-director of the Stanford Human-Centered AI (HAI) Institute, which aims to advance AI research, education, policy and practice to benefit humanity by bringing together interdisciplinary scholarship across the university. Her book, “The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration and Discovery at the Dawn of AI”, was published in November 2023.
In late 2025, World Labs launched its first product, Marble, which “lets you create, edit and share high-fidelity, persistent 3D worlds”. As well as large investors, Li’s World Labs has also attracted high-profile private investors such as Geoffrey Hinton, Ashton Kutcher and chief scientist of Google DeepMind, Jeff Dean.
Fei Fei Li. Image: ITU Pictures/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
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