The overly ambitious claims are what led them to raise $230M+ without a product.

Fei-Fei Li is a luminary in the field, and she's assembled a stellar team of some of the best researchers in the space.

Their gamble is that they'll be able to move faster than the open research and other companies looking to productionize that research.

Time will tell if this can become an ElevenLabs or if it'll fizzle out like Character.ai.

My worry is that without a product, they'll malinvestment their research into cool problems that don't satisfy market demand. There's nothing like the north star of customers. They'll also have a tough time with hiring going forward with that valuation.

The market of open research and models is producing a lot of neat stuff in 3D. But there's no open pool of data yet, despite HuggingFace and others trying.

We'll see what happens.

I thought you were kidding but World Labs really did raise $230M after being founded less than 1 year ago. Andreessen Horowitz too.

What would have to be true for this to be worth $100 billion after 5-10 years?

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/world-labs

Doesn't have to be 100 billions. They probably raised at a few billion valuation -- which I do agree is still a lot

I don't know enough about venture funding. Did $230M really get transferred into World Labs bank account, or is this a "commitment" of $230M which is trickled out a few million at a time?

Part of it is often dedicated to compute through credit commitments at Azure/Google/AWS. Probably not all is cash and available at t0.

That money will go fast though, given GPU costs and salary ranges in the bay

I believe Fei-Fei is focused on physical world interaction, https://behavior.stanford.edu/ is a project she works on for more physical interaction with AI