Claim◆Video · 1:17 — 1:53

Spatial intelligence is the next frontier of AI, and it requires building large world models—AI that can generate, understand, reason with, and interact with physical and virtual spaces.

Fei-Fei Li introduces World Labs as a two-year-old frontier model lab focused on spatial intelligence, which requires large world models capable of generating, understanding, reasoning with, and interacting with spaces. ✦ AI generated

Fei-Fei Li · a16z Podcast · 2026-07-28 · original ↗

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“Maybe you can give an overview of what World Labs does.”

World Labs is a two-year-old startup. It's a frontier model lab. We are building the next frontier of AI which is what we call spatial intelligence. Spatial intelligence is about creating AI that has the ability to generate, understand, reason with, and interact with spaces whether it's physical or virtual. A means to an end towards spatial intelligence is building large world models.

verbatim transcript · starts at 1:17

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1:17Labs does. >> Yeah. Well, World Lab has is a two-year-old startup. I I I think we should just recognize it's a frontier model lab. It's uh we we are building the next frontier of AI which is what we call spatial intelligence. And uh spatial intelligence is about um creating AI that has the ability to generate uh understand reason with and interact with spaces whether it's physical or virtual. And of

1:53course uh a means to an end towards spatial intelligence is building large world models. And that's what uh World Labs is mostly focused on. >> Yeah. So you've been saying this since the very beginning which is um you know the machine's ability to perceive and reason about spaces and act on spaces but I always had the assumption that the acting on spaces was some like longist future thing but now you're acquiring a

2:20robotics company and so maybe talk a little bit about the timeliness of this and the intentions. >> Yeah. So first of all, it doesn't just take robotics to act within spaces or to interact, right? I mean, look at the creative field, whether it's VFX or gaming and or design. Many use cases, you can create and act within virtual spaces. World Warlab's thesis has always been that um the the the the world we

▦ World Labs ◉ Fei-Fei Li

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Mechanism · 1

The role simulation plays that real-world data cannot is counterfactual reasoning—playing out events that haven't happened or cannot happen—and this is critical for robotics because we cannot possibly have enough real-world data.Fei-Fei Li · a16z Podcast · conf 85%

Evidence · 4

Spatial intelligence—the ability to generate, understand, reason with, and interact with physical or virtual spaces—is the next frontier of AI, and building large world models is the means to achieve it.Fei-Fei Li · a16z Podcast · conf 100%The next frontier of AI is spatial intelligence — creating AI that can generate, understand, reason with, and interact with physical or virtual spaces.Fei-Fei Li · a16z Podcast · conf 95%Simulation and real-world data collection are not contradictory; they operate in a data flywheel where physics-based simulation provides initial structure and consistency for robot training, then real-world data accumulation shifts toward more learning-based modeling over time.Yunu Guo · a16z Podcast · conf 80%Scene simulation provides reliability and efficiency that real-world data cannot, by enabling systematic randomization and coverage of the state space for robust robot training, and by allowing faster-than-human training speeds.Yunu Guo · a16z Podcast · conf 70%

Context · 2

Robotics progress follows a trajectory from fully structured environments (factories) to semi-structured environments (warehouses) to unstructured environments (homes), and the pragmatic near-term focus should be on semi-structured environments.Yunu Guo · a16z Podcast · conf 80%Achieving human-level power efficiency in robotics for menial tasks will take a very long time; the system complexity—hardware, software, brain, even finger friction coefficients—demands extensive iteration, unlike LLMs where performance-to-power is already close in narrow tasks.Yunu Guo & Fei-Fei Li · a16z Podcast · conf 70%

Extends · 1

Spatial intelligence is the next frontier of AI — the ability to generate, understand, reason with, and interact with spaces, whether physical or virtual.Fei-Fei Li · a16z Podcast · conf 80%