World Labs's Recent LinkedIn Posts

Millions of images are generated each day using text-to-image AI systems. Our latest brief examines how major image generation models encode a wide range of dangerous biases about demographic groups. Read or download here: https://lnkd.in/gQ36dYEP

It’s truly an honor to be recognized by my alma mater Princeton University for the Woodrow Wilson Prize! I had such a fun, heartwarming and also humbling experience back in the Old Nassau this weekend!😍🙏

It’s hard to believe Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) is 5 years old! It’s hard to believe that when we founded HAI on the premise of creating AI to “better humanity”, the world hadn’t yet seen the impact of all the large models and generative AI. What a time we live in! So much more work to do going forward.

In 1950, Alan Turing asked: Can machines think? Twenty-five years into my AI career, I'm still fascinated by his question. AI’s meteoric rise in the last few years has come largely through large language models (LLMs), which have demonstrated breathtaking capabilities in applications ranging from software engineering to agentic collaborations. Yet to a large degree LLMs remain wordsmiths in the dark: eloquent but ungrounded. I believe the next frontier of AI lies beyond words. Spatial intelligence—AI's ability to perceive, reason about, and interact with the 3D world—is the scaffolding upon which human cognition is built. From pre-verbal children learning through physical touch to firefighters navigating collapsing buildings through spatial instinct, it's fundamental to how we perceive, create, and interact with the world. It's the difference between describing a room and navigating it. And it's about to transform how we create and interact with real and virtual worlds—forever changing storytelling, creativity, robotics, scientific discovery, and beyond. At the core of unlocking spatial intelligence is the development of world models—a new type of generative AI that must meet a fundamentally different set of challenges than LLMs. These models must generate spatially consistent worlds that obey physical laws, process multimodal inputs from images to actions, and predict how those worlds evolve or be interacted with over time. In my new essay, I lay out the framework for what world models must achieve—three essential capabilities for building AI that creates with a storyteller's imagination, navigates with a first responder's fluency, and reasons about space with scientific precision. This is my North Star, and World Labs mission. Join us in pursuing it!

Ten years ago, Mark Zuckerberg's surprise appearance at NeurIPS signaled AI's leap from academia to Big Tech. But today the open research ecosystem that propelled AI is closing down. Meta cut its FAIR division, DeepMind embargoes research for competitive advantage, and OpenAI became ClosedAI. The retreat from open science threatens the foundation of scientific progress itself. Now is the time for academia to reassert its historic role. HAI Co-Directors John Etchemendy, James Landay, Fei-Fei Li, and HAI Associate Director Christopher Manning propose a new model of collaboration across universities, non-profits, governments, and industry partners that upholds AI research for the public good: https://lnkd.in/eTQjwt-m

Let’s build!!!💪🤩

Researchers are using Marble to generate simulation-ready robotics environments (gaussian splats + collider meshes) without manual scene construction. In recent workflows, Marble-generated scenes were brought into NVIDIA Robotics Isaac Sim to speed up environment setup and enable broader scene variation for training and evaluation. Case Study: https://lnkd.in/gsny5cvd Isaac Sim Technical Blog: https://lnkd.in/gdNsVkXE

Check out how we used Marble to make the launch video for Marble! It’s so fun to work behind the scenes to use this technology to help create and tell stories!

Love this essay from World Labs team! Just like codes, 3D is a universal interface for machines and people.🤩

I can’t begin to say how excited I am that the National Science Foundation (NSF) just launched a pilot for a National AI Research Resource. My HAI Co-Director John Etchemendy and I have been calling for this resource since we launched the institute in 2019. This will ensure that critically needed computing and data resources get into the hands of academia to pursue AI scientific discovery, which will balance private sector AI and lead to the development of technology for the public good. Next up? We need Congress to pass the CREATE AI Act. But this is a phenomenal first start! https://lnkd.in/gFsrY9uh

Today we’re adding 7,000 free credits for World API users 🌎 New signups get them automatically, and existing API accounts will receive them as well. In just a few weeks since launch, people are already building: • Apps that convert real-world spaces into digital cousins in minutes • Full 3D worlds generated on demand and loaded directly into simulators like MuJoCo • Architectural workflows that transform sketches into explorable browser-based environments Learn more about the World API: https://lnkd.in/ggmsu-x5 Start building today: https://lnkd.in/g5wVkXDE

I am truly honored to have been invited to offer the opening keynote for the Paris AI Action Summit #SommetActionIA, and looking forward to sharing in this momentous gathering with so many distinguished leaders of government and civil society, academia, industry, and the arts.

When I started Worlds I See, I thought I was writing a science book. Here in this conversation with ABC News' Linsey Davis, I explain why I decided to weave in my own coming-of-age story.  https://lnkd.in/g5XS9Mba

Congratulations to Fei-Fei Li and the World Labs team! AMD is proud to invest in the next leg of growth as the team explores creating spatially cohesive 3D worlds. More from the World Labs team: https://lnkd.in/g6DHw-E5

This came as a total surprise this morning. Very humbled… AI is built by generations of technologists, starting with the daring question of “can machines think?” by Alan Turing. It will be further developed, used and governed by many and all of us! Let’s keep our AI mission human-centered for the benefit of humanity! And I can’t wait to see where AI’s next frontier - spatial intelligence - will be taking us!

Thank you Anne Bouverot, I’m so excited and honored to participate in the Paris AI Action Summit next week alongside so many of the brightest minds gathering to address the important questions around this next chapter of AI!

After attending the State of the Union speech last night as a guest of my Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, I had a brief exchange with President Biden. I told him that his speech marked a historical moment - he was the first president to ever mention artificial intelligence during the #SOTU. He replied, “Yes! And keep it safe.” What a tremendous moment in time, and I’m so thankful to Anna not only for including me but also for her leadership on AI in Congress. Anna, with Rep. Michael McCaul, Rep. Don Beyer, and Rep. Jay Obernolte, introduced the critical CREATE AI Act, a bipartisan bill that will create stronger American public-sector AI.

Very honored! Thank you Yale University !

The other week, I had a great time talking about the importance of human-centered AI at Starbucks’s “Inspire” tech talk, together with Starbucks’ Chief Architect Ningyu Chen and Dreambox CEO Jessie W.. Thanks so much for the inspiring conversation! Cc: Jennifer Wong, Deb Hall Lefevre, Panos Madamopoulos-Moraris

We are immensely proud to celebrate the recognition of Stanford HAI Co-founding Director Fei-Fei Li, who has been awarded the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering alongside Stanford HAI Distinguished Fellows Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, and fellow laureates Bill Dally, John Hopfield, Jensen Huang, and Yann LeCun. This prestigious honor acknowledges their groundbreaking contributions that shaped the development of modern machine learning, a foundational pillar of today's AI revolution. Congratulations to all seven laureates on this well-deserved honor! 📸: Jason Alden

“Creativity is intelligence having fun.” Unleash your creativity and imagination with Marble - our 3D world generation model, now available to everyone! 🚀

With Chisel, you can keep the same structure and explore completely different worlds. Ancient tomb 🏺 → lava cavern 🌋 → overgrown ruins 🌿 Same layout, totally different feel. Chisel lets you block out a 3D layout and generate a detailed world on top, so you define the space first and then bring it to life. In this demo, we used that workflow to build and explore a range of environments with off-axis projection, all running in the browser. Pipeline: → Block out structure in Blender or directly in Chisel → Use Chisel to generate a detailed environment from that layout → Bring it into Three.js and use Spark for rendering → Use Mediapipe for face tracking to enable off-axis projection You can go from a rough spatial idea to something you can actually move around in very quickly. Learn more about Chisel: https://lnkd.in/gS4sXtvM

What is a really really hard problem to work on in #AI? My own answer is Spatial Intelligence - a technology that could empower and enable countless possible use cases in creation, design, learning, AR/VR, robotics, and beyond. It’s a real honor that my cofounders Justin Johnson Christoph Lassner Ben Mildenhall and I are joined by a formidable team of world class pixel talents to start World Labs to work on this super hard problem that took Mother Nature half a billion years to solve.

World Labs has raised $1 billion in new funding. We are grateful and excited to partner with our investors, including AMD, Autodesk, Emerson Collective, Fidelity Management & Research Company, NVIDIA, and Sea, among others. Read the blog: https://lnkd.in/g6DHw-E5 We are focused on accelerating our mission to advance spatial intelligence by building world models that revolutionize storytelling, creativity, robotics, scientific discovery, and beyond. Excited about our vision? Come join us. Careers: https://lnkd.in/gcRyXu6c

Thank you Jon Levin ! Truly appreciate!

Thank you so much, Georgia Levenson Keohane, I enjoyed our conversation!

Today, HM The King presented Dr Bill Dally, Dr Fei-Fei Li, Professor Geoffrey Hinton, Jensen Huang, Professor John Hopfield, Dr Yann LeCun and Professor Yoshua Bengio with the #QEPrize2025 trophies during a Presentation Ceremony at St James's Palace.    Together, these seven engineers have made seminal contributions to the development of Modern Machine Learning, a core component of artificial intelligence (AI) advancements. Modern machine learning enables systems to learn from data, identify patterns, and make decisions or predictions without being explicitly programmed for every scenario. This capacity for self-improvement is crucial in advancing AI, as it allows models to adapt and improve over time as they encounter new data. The recent advances in machine learning rely on innovations in algorithms, processing power and benchmark datasets. It is the combination of these interrelated breakthroughs that underpins the widespread adoption and application of AI systems. A truly amazing occasion celebrating the pinnacle of global engineering 👑

Introducing RTFM (Real-Time Frame Model) 🤩 We’re excited to share RTFM, a highly efficient World Model that generates video frames in real time as you interact with it, powered by a single H100 GPU! RTFM renders 3D-consistent, persistent worlds, both real and imaginary, directly from 2D images — no explicit 3D reconstruction required. Trained on large-scale video data, it learns to model geometry, reflections, and shadows simply by observation. It takes one or more 2D images as input and directly generates new 2D views of the same scene from different points of view — a learned renderer that builds spatial understanding through experience. You can use RTFM to reconstruct real-world locations from sparse photographs, or imagine entirely new spaces. Try our live demo hosted on cloud GPUs (mobile supported): 👉 rtfm.worldlabs.ai Learn more: 🔗 worldlabs.ai/blog/rtfm

Incredibly honored and excited to join my friend, U.S. Representative Anna Eshoo, at the State of the Union address this week. It’s so encouraging to see our government move forward on key policies around AI, including introducing the CREATE AI Act and launching the NSF’s pilot program of a National AI Research Resource - something we at Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) have been championing since our launch in 2019. Looking forward to this! https://lnkd.in/grd2XsPj

Calling AI+healthcare experts! We’re hosting our first RAISE Health symposium on May 14. RAISE Health is a collab between Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) and Stanford University School of Medicine focused on ethical AI in healthcare. During this virtual symposium, we'll dive deep into essential discussions with luminaries from tech, medicine, and policy, exploring AI’s potential to reshape healthcare while addressing the crucial safety and ethical concerns. Don’t miss our inaugural event! https://lnkd.in/gzbwYfCv #AIinMedicine #HealthTech #FutureofHealthcare 🚀🩺

No one exemplifies the letter “H” in “Stanford HAI (human-centered AI)” better than the thought leadership demonstrated by my friend and colleague Prof. James Landay!

70 hackers joined us in SF for the first-ever World Labs Hackathon. In just 3.5 hours, 32 teams used Marble for projects ranging from robotics sims and agents to AR/VR interfaces, games, art experiences, and real estate tools. Check out what they built 👇 🥇 Musée du Monde — an interactive museum where visitors step inside famous paintings. From Van Gogh’s bedroom to worlds inspired by Vermeer and Matisse, each artwork becomes a fully explorable 3D environment generated with Marble. https://lnkd.in/gPbm3JrV 🥈 Jar of Marbles — a semantic interface for organizing Marble worlds into clusters like realistic vs geometric or vast vs intimate, explored using computer vision gesture controls. https://lnkd.in/g3uMeGeK 🥉 Augmented Virtuality Room - uses Marble worlds as simulation environments for robotics. A robot explores with raycast LiDAR, builds a semantic map, and comments on the environment in real time. https://lnkd.in/gt69PpXS 👏 Honorable mentions: Marble Estates, Holocrime, Inkling, and Blocks. Huge thank you to all the hackers who joined us for WL-HACK 01. This event was about bringing together builders excited about the future of world models and spatial intelligence. The creativity and range of ideas we saw in just a few hours was incredible.

I had such a great time talking to the thoughtful Alan Alda on his podcast Clear and Vivid Podcast about my book, The Worlds I See. Our conversation spanned from childhood memories to the career gamble I took with ImageNet to my fascination with Biederman’s number. Thanks for such a wide-ranging chat! https://lnkd.in/guDK-dwk

I want to express my deep gratitude to journalist Campbell Brown for hosting a book party for "The Worlds I See." A big thank you to all who attended and expressed interest in my story!

Our imaginations are unbounded, so should the worlds we create be…🌐😍

I’m happy to announce the newest member of HAI’s corporate affiliate program: American Express. With their size and global reach, it’s vital that we work together to build new tools that are safe, useful, and responsible. Panos Madamopoulos-Moraris and I look forward to working with Ravi Radhakrishnan and his team on exciting new research directions!

I had such a nice time chatting with host Alok Jha of The Economist’s podcast Babbage. We dug into the early challenges of computer vision, talked about how those advances led to the chatbots we see today, and explored the very real opportunities and challenges for the next generation of artificial intelligence. https://lnkd.in/g89f9-Cy

During her London visit, HAI Co-founding Director Fei-Fei Li engaged in policy discussions with Secretary of State for Business & Trade Peter Kyle and Secretary of State for Science, Innovation & Technology Liz Kendall to discuss deepening transatlantic collaboration on AI innovation and governance.

Thrilled to have the opportunity to speak at Microsoft’s Global Nonprofit Leaders Summit last week! Special thanks to Juan M. Lavista Ferres for the thoughtful conversation around human-centered AI and to Brad Smith for Microsoft’s continued support for Stanford HAI’s mission. Additionally, alongside Panos Madamopoulos-Moraris, we showcased the remarkable progress in fundamental research and scientific discovery across Stanford, fueled by the generous support of Microsoft's Azure grant. And speaking of nonprofits, HAI is releasing a new working paper on opportunity gaps in this sector next week - stay tuned! Cc: Michele Burlington, Elizabeth Bruce, Microsoft for Nonprofits, Teresa Hutson, Kate Behncken, Satya Nadella.

It’s here! Looking forward to digging into the 2024 AI Index, which shows AI’s major advances, trends in investments and education, the regulatory landscape, and so much more (and at 500 pages, I’m serious about the “more”!). https://lnkd.in/ggDweGam

We owe a debt of gratitude to America's veterans! Properly implemented AI can help advance the healthcare of our veterans. I'm thrilled U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough took the time to meet with me on behalf of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) and listen to my perspectives on the importance of data.

"My first instinct is always to ask AI." The architects of AI are also its biggest users in 2025. TIME asked Jensen Huang of Nvidia, Robin Li of Baidu, and Masayoshi Son of SoftBank how they rely on AI and how many chatbots they actually use. A behind-the-scenes look at how AI is shaping the decisions of the world’s most powerful tech leaders. Read about the Architects of AI, TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year: https://lnkd.in/eFmD9d9t

Happy building! 🤩

We've known World Labs cofounder Fei-Fei Li for nearly two decades. She was joining Stanford as a new professor while a16z’s Martin Casado was just leaving to do his own startup. And she has advised the firm on AI many times in the past. Now, we are thrilled to partner with her and co-founders Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, Ben Mildenhall and the world-class team at World Labs, with our latest investment. Alongside language, there has been a “pixel” revolution in generative AI, allowing us to create images and videos from text descriptions of what we want to see. Unlike language models, these generated images are reflections of the physical world. But while these sorts of models are tremendously useful for creating images and videos, none are quite as general as LLMs are for language. For example, none can create a true 3D representation of a world you can walk through, interact with, and build upon — something that isn’t just confined to a screen, but an actual representation of the real world (or perhaps a generated virtual world), that sits within a computer, and allows for reasoning about physics and cause-and-effect. It is this problem that brings us to World Labs. At this point, the company is deep at work pushing the frontiers of the spatial intelligence problem. They’re building a foundation model that can generate 3D interactive worlds which are the basis for spatial reasoning. We are honored to be part of it. More from Martin Casado and Sarah Wang: https://lnkd.in/edFYq-Fp