A week late getting to this but still noteworthy.
From Reuters, September 13:
- Initial funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise Associates, and Radical Ventures
- World Labs focuses on 'spatial intelligence'
- Li will continue some of her work at Stanford while building the startup
Sept 13 (Reuters) - Fei-Fei Li, a leading artificial intelligence researcher, has raised $230 million for a startup she and three colleagues founded to make AI technology that can understand how the three-dimensional physical world works, the company said on Friday.
Initial funding for World Labs was led jointly by Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise Associates and Radical Ventures. Other investors included AMD (AMD.O) Ventures, Intel (INTC.O) Capital and Nvidia's (NVDA.O) NVentures.
World Labs declined to share its valuation.Li, one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2023, led AI at Google Cloud from 2017 to 2018, served on Twitter's board of directors and has done stints advising policymakers, including at the White House.The Stanford University professor is widely known as the "godmother of AI," a moniker alluding to the three "godfather" winners of the 2018 Turing Award, the computing world's top prize, for their breakthroughs in AI technology....
If interested see also:
May 2024 - "‘Godmother of A.I.’ Fei-Fei Li On Why You Shouldn’t Trust Any A.I. Company"
It's not the technology that should be feared it is the people using the technology.
In March 2016 this seemed noteworthy:
The Hottest PhD Market In the World
From The .Plan: A Quasi-Blog:
Fei-Fei Li, a Stanford University professor who is an expert in computer vision, said one of her Ph.D. candidates had an offer for a job paying more than $1 million a year, and that was only one of four from big and small companies.
--John Markoff and Steve Lohr, NYT, on the brains arms race in artificial intelligence
And in May 2024 this did:
Former Google CEO Schmidt On The Ever-Increasing Tempo Of AI
Gardels: One thing that worries Fei-Fei Li of the Stanford Institute on Human-Centered AI is the asymmetry of research funding between the Microsofts and Googles of the world and even the top universities. As you point out, there are hundreds of billions invested in compute power to climb up the capability ladder in the private sector, but scarce resources for safe development at research institutes, no less the public sector....
....Eventually, in both the U.S. and China, I suspect there will be a small number of extremely powerful computers with the capability for autonomous invention that will exceed what we want to give either to our own citizens without permission or to our competitors. They will be housed in an army base, powered by some nuclear power source and surrounded by barbed wire and machine guns.....
Again, only those with massive amounts of cash will be able to maximize the benefits of AI.
See advantage flywheels and hyper-Pareto distribution of profits if interested.
And possibly most important:
March 18 - In Nvidia's World, If You (and your company) Don't Have Money You Will Not Be Able To Compete (NVDA)
