The Sage
Co-founder and Chief Executive of World Labs, who can give AI systems a model of the physical world as well as of language.
She builds world models that perceive, generate and reason about three-dimensional space, and argues that spatial and language intelligence are complementary.
In February 2026 World Labs raised $1 billion, including $200 million from Autodesk, and made its first product, Marble, generally available.
Market Status reads Fei-Fei Li as The Sage. The friction this archetype resolves is that most deployed AI reasons over text and flat images while the work businesses do happens in physical space.
She co-founded World Labs in 2024 with Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner and Ben Mildenhall, and raised $230 million in September 2024 to launch it. The company’s first product, Marble, generates explorable 3D worlds from text, images, video or spatial sketches, and a World API lets developers use generated worlds in applications and simulations. She is widely known as the godmother of AI for her work on ImageNet.
Her stated aim is to advance spatial intelligence by building world models for storytelling, creativity, robotics and scientific discovery. She says spatial intelligence is as critical as, and complementary to, language intelligence.
World Labs did not disclose a valuation for the 2026 round, although Bloomberg reported discussions at about $5 billion in January. Yann LeCun, formerly Meta’s chief AI scientist, left to found AMI Labs around world models, so the approach is attracting a crowded field, and an analyst note points out that a product category does not by itself prove human-level physical understanding.
Against the journey, Li is Building. The Creator Economy’s verification badges and the Attention Economy’s attribution standards were built for flat content, and generated 3D worlds will arrive in the same channels without an equivalent record of origin. Market Status reads that as an early signal for the Marketing and Operations functions, which will use generated worlds for design, simulation and training, and for the Research and Development function, which will want to know what a simulated result rests on.
Appeared in AMD’s keynote at CES 2026 in Las Vegas. Reuters via Yahoo Finance
Announced a $1 billion funding round and said World Labs is focused on spatial intelligence through world models for storytelling, creativity, robotics and scientific discovery. Pulse 2.0
Said that spatial intelligence is as critical as, and complementary to, language intelligence. Cited through a recap. StartupHub.ai
Entries are added as new public statements appear. Last updated 19 October 2026.
Funding the build, for readers who can direct capital toward the containerization.
Developing the micro-container that holds the gap, for readers who can make the technology.
Helping the micro-container reach scale, for readers who can set standards, convene consensus or move the political and regulatory conditions.
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