In the wave of generative AI, the benefits of large language models (LLMs) are gradually being captured by giants, while "AI mother" Fei-Fei Li has already keenly identified and led the next golden track. According to the latest news from Bloomberg, the startup company World Labs founded by Fei-Fei Li is currently conducting a new funding round with a valuation of up to $5 billion, aiming to raise funds amounting to $500 million.

This means that within just one year, the value of World Labs has increased five times, from $1 billion to $5 billion. This spring frenzy in the capital market is not only an ultimate tribute to Fei-Fei Li's academic prestige but also a costly pricing of the "world model" as a hard-core approach.

World Labs was established in April 2024, with an initial valuation of $200 million, backed by top investment institutions such as a16z and Radical Ventures. Subsequently, a series of AI "god-like" figures, including NVIDIA, Temasek, and Google's chief scientist Jeff Dean, joined in, helping it rapidly become a unicorn.

What has attracted the capital's frenzy is World Labs's developing "Large World Model (LWM)." Fei-Fei Li believes that AI should not merely generate beautiful images or smooth text; it must truly understand the structure and evolution of the physical world. Its first 3D world generation model, Marble, can directly generate exploratory 3D spaces through text or images, and provide critical "collision mesh" support for physical simulations and robot simulations.

In Fei-Fei Li's strategic vision, the world model is a necessary path to "spatial intelligence." It can not only create worlds that follow the laws of physics but also possess multi-modal processing and interaction prediction capabilities. This infrastructure-level capability will comprehensively empower the AIGC industry—from 3D asset generation and virtual shooting to more imaginative embodied intelligent robots.

It is worth noting that the competition over "the world" is showing a dual-horse situation: Yann LeCun, a Turing Award winner, founded AMI Labs, which is also seeking funding with a valuation of $3.5 billion. Unlike Fei-Fei Li's preference for explicit and generatable 3D environments, LeCun insists on an abstract cognitive approach based on JEPA.

The intensive investment from capital indicates that the next decade of AI will no longer be just about "language," but about "the world." As top minds and massive hot money converge at the intersection of four-dimensional space-time, a new era of true spatial intelligence is accelerating toward us.