The ‘Godmother’ of Artificial Intelligence Invented a Billion-Dollar Business: What It's About.

Fei-Fei Li, a renowned global expert in the field of artificial intelligence, has created a new startup called World Labs, which in just four months has reached a valuation of over a billion dollars. The goal of this project is to develop artificial intelligence capable of analyzing visual data. This was reported by the Financial Times.

Fei-Fei Li made a significant contribution to the field of computer vision, which deals with the interpretation and understanding of visual information by machines. She led the development of ImageNet - a huge database for research in the area of visual object recognition. From 2017 to 2018, Fei-Fei Li headed the artificial intelligence department at Google Cloud, and now she provides consultations to the White House working group on this issue.

World Labs aims to develop an artificial intelligence model capable of understanding complex concepts by processing visual data. This is similar to OpenAI's approach with their GPT series of generative artificial intelligence models. A representative of one of the venture investors familiar with Fei-Fei Li's work told the Financial Times: "World Labs is developing a model that can analyze the three-dimensional world, find the sizes of objects, their locations, and actions with them at a given moment."

The startup has already gone through two rounds of financing, the latest of which amounted to about 100 million dollars with support from venture funds such as Andreessen Horowitz and Radical Ventures. Incidentally, Fei-Fei Li became a partner of the latter fund last year.

At the TED conference in April, Fei-Fei Li gave a presentation about the research directions her startup will continue to work on. This includes an algorithm that can transform images and text into a three-dimensional environment and predict future data based on past trends using the concept of 'spatial intelligence'. Experts note that this technology could significantly impact areas such as robotics, augmented reality, virtual reality, and computer vision.

Investments in World Labs reflect a general trend where venture capitalists are eager to join high-profile and ambitious projects in the field of artificial intelligence, inspired by the success of OpenAI, which is valued at over 80 billion dollars.

Ukraine is also developing artificial intelligence systems for managing a large fleet of drones. The use of AI-supported drones on the front line will help overcome obstacles from the Russian side and allow UAVs to operate in large groups.