Fei-Fei Li co-founded World Labs in October 2023, drawing on her long academic career at Stanford, where she created the ImageNet dataset that helped catalyze the modern deep learning era in computer vision. As CEO, Li has positioned World Labs around "spatial intelligence" - AI that understands and generates 3D environments - as a deliberately different technical frontier from the text-centric large language models dominating most of the industry's attention.
Li continues to hold her academic position at Stanford alongside leading World Labs, and has argued publicly that spatial and physical understanding represents a genuinely distinct and underinvested capability gap in current AI systems, one she believes will matter increasingly for robotics, gaming, and design applications.