By creating ImageNet, a specialized database of digital pictures that made neurological nets considerably smarter, about ten years ago, Li helped AI change a part. She feels that today’s deep-learning concepts need a similar increase if AI is to make real kingdoms, whether they’re realistic models or completely imagined universes. Instead of writing prose, futurist George R. R. Martins may write their dreamed-up universes as prompts, which you could therefore generate and wander through. ” The real world for laptops is seen through devices, and the machine head behind the cameras”, Li says. ” Turning that perspective into reasoning, creation, and eventual conversation involves understanding the physical composition, the natural relationships of the real world. And that systems is called geographical knowledge”. World Labs describes itself as a” space intelligence company,” and its future will determine whether that phrase may turn into a trend or a punch line.
Li has spent years pondering geographic knowledge. While everyone was going lady over ChatGPT, she and a former pupil, Justin Johnson, were eagerly gabbling in phone calls about AI’s future generation. ” The next generation will be about generating fresh material that takes computer vision, profound understanding, and AI out of the online world, and gets them embedded in space and time”, says Johnson, who is now an associate professor at the University of Michigan.
After a dinner with Martin Casado, a pioneer in virtual networking and now a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, Li made the decision to launch a business in early 2023. That VC firm is renowned for its almost messianic embrace of AI. Casado sees AI as being on a similar path as computer games, which started with text, moved to 2D graphics, and now have dazzling 3D imagery. The change will be driven by spatial intelligence. Eventually, he says,” You could take your favorite book, throw it into a model, and then you literally step into it and watch it play out in real time, in an immersive way”, he says. Moving from large-language models to large-world models is the first step, Casado and Li said.
Li began assembling a team, with Johnson as a cofounder. Casado suggested two more people—one was Christoph Lassner, who had worked at Amazon, Meta’s Reality Labs, and Epic Games. He is the creator of Pulsar, a rendering technique that developed a well-known method known as 3D Gaussian Splatting. That sounds like an indie band at an MIT toga party, but it’s actually a way to synthesize scenes, as opposed to one-off objects. Casado’s other suggestion was Ben Mildenhall, who had created a powerful technique called NeRF—neural radiance fields—that transmogrifies 2D pixel images into 3D graphics. ” We took real-world objects into VR and made them look perfectly real”, he says. He resigned from his position at Google as a senior research scientist to join Li’s team.
One obvious goal of a large world model would be imbuing, well, world-sense into robots. That indeed is in World Labs ‘ plan, but not for a while. The first phase is building a model with a deep understanding of three dimensionality, physicality, and notions of space and time. Next will there be a phase where the models will support augmented reality. After that the company can take on robotics. If this vision is fulfilled, large world models will improve autonomous cars, automated factories, and maybe even humanoid robots.
That’s a long way away, and no slam dunk. A product is expected to be released in 2025 by World Labs. When I asked the founders what the product would be exactly like and who the anticipated customers would be, they said they were just starting out. ” There are a lot of boundaries to push, a lot of unknowns”, says Li. ” Of course, we’re the best team in the world to figure out these unknowns”.
Casado is a little more specific. As with ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, he notes, a model can be the product—a platform that others either use directly or that hosts other apps. Clientele might include movie studios or game studios. I can recall seeing how Pixar would spend endless resources on things like water movement and monster fur. Imagine doing that with a one-sentence prompt.
Not only is World Labs the only company tackling what some refer to as physical AI. One of the most exciting challenges facing AI today is creating foundation models for general-humanoid robots, according to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang earlier this year. I recently wrote about a business called Archetype that was also working on that direction. But Casado insists that the ambition, talent, and vision of World Labs is unique. ” I’ve been investing for almost 10 years, and this is the single best team I’ve ever, ever run across”, he says. It’s common for a VC to boost his bets, but he’s putting more than money into this one: For the first time since he became a VC, he’s a part-time team member, spending a day a week at the company.
Other VC firms are also chipping in, including Radical Ventures, NEA, and ( surprise ) Nvidia’s venture capital arm, as well as an all-star list of angels that features Marc Benioff, Reid Hoffman, Jeff Dean, Eric Schmidt, Ron Conway, and Geoff Hinton. ( So you’ve got the godfather of AI backing the field’s godmother. ) Susan Wojcicki, who passed away last month, was also an investor.
Can all those intelligent people be mistaken? Of course. You do n’t need to squint all that hard to see how World Lab’s promises stack up against a recent buzzword that debuzzed rather dramatically: the metaverse. The founders of World Lab contend that the short-lived craze was premature and was the result of some promising hardware that was n’t having the appropriate interactive content. Large world models, they imply, could solve that problem. Presumably, none of those worlds would visualize AI as stuck on a plateau.
Time Travel
Last year, Fei-Fei Li came out with a combination memoir and AI love story, The Worlds I See. In a Plaintext with the title” Fei-Fei Li Started an AI Revolution by Seeing Like an Algorithm” at the time, I praised the book and had an open discussion about it with her. She now intends to create worlds that no one has yet seen.
Li is a shy individual who finds it uncomfortable to discuss herself. But she masterfully incorporated her knowledge of immigration, arriving in the country at the age of 16 with no prior language knowledge, and overcame obstacles to become a key player in this crucial technology. She has also served as the director of the Stanford AI Lab and the chief scientist for AI and machine learning at Google Cloud prior to her current position. Li claims that her book is arranged like a double helix, with her personal quest and AI’s trajectory intertwined into a spiraling whole. We keep examining who we are through how we see ourselves, Li says. ” Technology itself is a part of the reflection. The hardest world to see is ourselves”.
The strands come together most dramatically in her narrative of ImageNet’s creation and implementation. Li recounts her determination to defy those, including her colleagues, who doubted it was possible to label and categorize millions of images, with at least 1, 000 examples for every one of a sprawling list of categories, from throw pillows to violins. The effort necessitated the sweat of literally thousands of people ( spoiler: Amazon’s Mechanical Turk aided in the effort ). Only when we understand her personal journey can we understand the project. The parents, who insisted she turn down a lucrative job in the business world to pursue her dream of becoming a scientist, gave her the courage to embark on such a risky project. The ultimate validation of their sacrifice would be the execution of this moonshot.
Ask Me One Thing
Tom continues,” When the smartphone was new, people used to discuss public etiquette when using it; now, it’s common to see people staring at their phones in public spaces.” What do you suppose the rules will be for wearing AR headgear?
Hi, Tom, thanks for the question. It wo n’t be as simple to use AR as it is with phones, where it becomes all too obvious when our attention is focused on palm slabs. When companies discover how to incorporate augmented reality into lightweight eyewear, similar to Meta’s popular Ray-Ban glasses, which do n’t yet support AR but will eventually do so, will the apex of it emerge. Many of the things we currently see on our phones can be read in head-up displays.
At that point, it wo n’t be so obvious that behind our sunglasses we are more involved with TikTok, texts, and Candy Crush than our dinner companions. Public spaces may not appear to be where everyone actually is, but they will. I believe haptics will be necessary to inform people when their trains are departing, when they are blocking a doorway, when they have been robbed. And a typical dinner conversation may go like this:” Have you heard what I just said” ?]Silence. ] ARE YOU AWARE OF WHAT I JUST SAID? ]Pause, touches side panel of glasses. ]” Yes of course I’m paying attention. ” This will be happening at every table in the restaurant!
My etiquette prediction? People will end up texting each other even when they are standing, because whatever they say will be more interesting if it’s projected directly to your eyeball and earpiece. Stop worrying about people staring at phones because worse days are brewing.
You can submit questions to [email protected]. Include the phrase” ASK LEVY” in the subject line.
End Times Chronicle
How can it get any hotter? Just wait.
Last but Not Least
Here’s everything announced at Apple’s September event.
While the iPhone 16 got attention, AirPods that act like hearing aids might have been Apple’s most significant move
According to Mark Cuban, Mark Cuban is not having a midlife crisis.
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