World Labs is an artificial intelligence company operating in the field of spatial intelligence. Founded in 2024 in San Francisco, California, the company aims to develop large-scale artificial intelligence models known as Large World Models (LWM), which are capable of perceiving, generating, and interacting with the three-dimensional world. Its founders include Fei-Fei Li, Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, and Ben Mildenhall.
Establishment and Vision
World Labs was established with the goal of enabling AI systems to go beyond processing two-dimensional images and text, and instead understand three-dimensional physical and virtual environments. The company focuses on enhancing the spatial reasoning capabilities of AI so that systems can comprehend interactions between objects, places, and time. This approach goes beyond visual perception and language models by aiming to create consistent and interactive 3D scenes grounded in physical principles.
Technological Developments
World Labs develops AI systems that not only analyze images but also build explorable 3D scenes based on those images. Its first technological demonstration was a system capable of generating an interactive and editable 3D environment from a single photograph. This allows users to navigate within the scene and make real-time modifications to objects. The generated scenes can run in browsers and support interactive effects such as depth perception.
Applications (World Labs)
The company's technologies have potential applications in film production, game development, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), design, education, and robotics. The models are developed with a focus on physical consistency, object continuity, and spatial coherence.
Founders and Ecosystem
The founding team of World Labs comprises scientists known for pioneering work in AI, computer vision, and graphics modeling. Fei-Fei Li is a professor at Stanford University and co-director of the Human-Centered AI Institute. She is also the creator of the ImageNet dataset, which played a critical role in the advancement of deep learning-based computer vision. Justin Johnson is recognized for his contributions to style transfer and learning techniques in computer vision. Ben Mildenhall is one of the developers of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), and Christoph Lassner is known for his work in graphical processing and synthetic data generation.
The company’s engineering and research staff are experienced in areas such as graphics systems, AI infrastructure, generative models, and software engineering.
Research Approach and Academic Background
World Labs' technical vision is strongly influenced by the academic backgrounds of its founding members. Fei-Fei Li holds the position of Sequoia Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and is the founding co-director of the Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute. She previously directed the Stanford AI Lab and served as Chief Scientist of AI at Google Cloud. Her ImageNet project, launched in 2006, was pivotal in the evolution of deep learning-based vision models.
The other co-founders—Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, and Ben Mildenhall—have academic publications and projects in topics such as visual content creation, style transfer, physical simulation, and 3D scene modeling. The company’s R&D activities reflect these academic strengths through direct integration into model architectures and applications.
World Labs also prioritizes enhancing the physical accuracy of models concerning lighting, depth, and structural consistency. Its work spans technologies such as computer graphics, neural radiance fields (NeRF), artificial vision systems, and multimodal analysis.
Investment and Corporate Structure
World Labs has received significant backing from venture capital firms, including Andreessen Horowitz, Radical Ventures, NEA, Adobe Ventures, AMD Ventures, NVentures (NVIDIA), Salesforce Ventures, and Databricks Ventures. As of 2024, the company has raised a total of $230 million and reached a valuation exceeding $1 billion. Prominent individual investors such as Eric Schmidt, Geoffrey Hinton, Reid Hoffman, Marc Benioff, Ashton Kutcher, Anne Wojcicki, and Jeff Dean have also supported the company.
Application Areas and Future Goals
The spatial intelligence systems developed by World Labs are intended for use in virtual environment design, educational simulations, healthcare technologies, autonomous robotics, augmented reality applications, and related industries. The company aims to not only focus on research but also holistically manage engineering and productization processes. Accordingly, it is working on the development of enterprise products and the expansion of user-oriented applications.
The company’s first products are expected to be launched in 2025, with ongoing parallel efforts in research and development.
