World Labs

World Labs was co-founded by AI researcher Fei-Fei Li together with Justin JohnsonJustin JohnsonJustin Johnson is an American computer vision and artificial intelligence researcher, co-founder of the spatial intelligence company World Labs, and an adjunct professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department at the University of Michigan. He earned his PhD in Fei-Fei Li’s lab at Stanford University and previously served as an assistant professor at the University of Michigan and as a research scientist at Meta FAIR.Open the full entry, Ben MildenhallBen MildenhallBen Mildenhall is a computer graphics and 3D computer vision researcher and a co-founder of World Labs.Open the full entry and Christoph LassnerChristoph LassnerChristoph Lassner is a co-founder of World Labs.Open the full entry, who work in machine learning, generative AI, computer vision and graphics. The company says that since its founding in 2024 its goal has been to advance spatial intelligence, enabling AI to model and reason about objects, places and interactions across space and time.⁠[1][2][1]

In September 2024 World Labs came out of stealth, announcing that it had raised $230 million over two rounds spaced a few months apart from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Radical VenturesRadical VenturesRadical Ventures is an artificial intelligence-focused venture capital firm founded by Jordan Jacobs and Tomi Poutanen shortly after the 2017 launch of the Vector Institute in Toronto. It invests from incubation and seed through growth and pre-IPO stages, and its portfolio includes companies such as Cohere, Waabi, and World Labs. In 2026, it co-led the investment in Discovery Loop, founded by Jeff Dean and others, and completed the first close of its late-stage Radical Breakouts Fund.Open the full entry, at a valuation of more than $1 billion. The company said it was developing “large world models” and aimed to have its first product ready in 2025 for professionals such as artists, designers, developers and engineers.⁠[3][3][3]

In December 2024 World Labs published “Generating Worlds,” sharing early progress toward persistent, navigable 3D worlds that can be explored in a browser.⁠[4]

In September 2025 World Labs released new 3D world generation results, with bigger, more stylistically diverse worlds and cleaner geometry, and launched a limited-access beta preview of Marble at marble.worldlabs.ai: from a single image or text prompt, users can generate a 3D world they can explore for as long as they wish without morphing or inconsistency, and export it as Gaussian splats. The company also promoted its open-source rendering library Spark, which integrates Gaussian splats into Three.js for building web-based 3D experiences on desktops, mobile devices and VR headsets.⁠[5][5][5][5][5]

In October 2025 World Labs released RTFM (Real-Time Frame Model), a real-time generative world model, as a research preview. It generates video in real time as the user interacts with it, runs at interactive frame rates on a single H100 GPU, does not rely on explicit 3D representations, and maintains a persistent 3D world.⁠[6][6][6][6][6]

On November 12, 2025, Marble became available to everyone. It could now create 3D worlds from text, images, video or coarse 3D layouts, supported interactive editing, expanding and combining of worlds, and could export to Gaussian splats, meshes or video; Chisel, an experimental editing mode for advanced users, lets users first lay out the structure of a world in 3D with coarse shapes such as boxes and planes. The company also launched Marble Labs, a creative hub with case studies and tutorials for artists, engineers and designers across gaming, visual effects, design, robotics and other fields.⁠[7][7][7][7][7][7]

In January 2026 World Labs launched the World API, a public interface that lets developers call the Marble model programmatically to generate navigable 3D worlds asynchronously from text, single or multiple images, 360-degree panoramas and video; results can be rendered on the web, exported to other tools, or integrated into interactive systems and simulations. The company cited examples: Escape.ai uses it to turn 2D films into navigable 3D environments; in robotics, generated environments can be integrated into simulators such as NVIDIA Isaac Sim, MuJoCo and RoboSuite; and in architecture and design, platforms such as xFigura integrate it into design workflows.⁠[8][8][8][8][8][8][8]

In February 2026 World Labs announced $1 billion in new funding from investors including AMD, Autodesk, Emerson CollectiveEmerson CollectiveEmerson Collective is an investment and philanthropic organization founded by Laurene Powell Jobs and headquartered in Palo Alto, California. Structured as a limited liability company, it supports businesses and nonprofits through venture investments, grants and collaborative programs in education, economic mobility, immigration, the environment, health and media.Open the full entry, Fidelity Management & Research Company, NVIDIA and Sea, among others.⁠[9]

In April 2026 World Labs presented Spark 2.0. The dynamic 3D Gaussian splatting renderer, built on THREE.js and WebGL2 and running in browsers on desktop, iOS, Android and VR, added a Level-of-Detail (LoD) system that can stream and render huge 3D Gaussian splatting worlds on any device.⁠[10][10]

On July 21, 2026, SceniX, a robotics and simulation company, joined World Labs. SceniX develops a real-to-sim-to-real (R2S2R) engine that turns real robots, environments and interactions into simulations for policy training and evaluation, turning one real task into many controllable, reusable worlds. World Labs said this broadens its use cases from virtual to physical environments; early results it published say simulations generated by the engine allow robots to learn complex manipulation tasks with zero real-world training data and to predict in simulation which policies will succeed in the real world.⁠[11][11][11][11][12]

In September 2026 World Labs introduced Atlas, its next-generation world model. It is an “omni” model pretrained from scratch to operate natively on text, images, video and 3D, built as a multimodal autoregressive diffusion transformer that combines all inputs into a shared spatial context. It can generate up to one minute of 1440p video from reference images along a specified camera path, reconstruct real scenes from one to dozens of images with explicit 3D outputs, model space and time from input video to support real-to-sim workflows for robotics, and generate images and 360-degree panoramas from text. The company said Atlas will power future versions of Marble and other products, and opened requests for early access.⁠[13][13][13][13][13][13]

On September 28, 2026, AMD announced that it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire World Labs in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $8.2 billion, expected to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. AMD chief executive Lisa Su said that building the compute platforms for the next generation of AI requires a deep understanding of how models are evolving, and that World Labs’ research and model expertise will help AMD develop the corresponding hardware, software and systems and strengthen the open AI ecosystem.⁠[14][14][14][14]

According to the two companies’ announcements, after the transaction closes Fei-Fei Li will become AMD’s executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting directly to Lisa Su; Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall will work with Fei-Fei Li to continue leading the World Labs team as it joins AMD to form “a world leading frontier research organization,” with the team continuing to focus on AI model research. World Labs said the two companies began a deep technical partnership in 2025, starting with optimizing model training and inference on AMD GPUs, and committed to building an end-to-end open AI ecosystem spanning hardware, software, platforms and open models. As of October 2026, the transaction had not yet closed.⁠[14][2][2][2][2][15]

Timothy Prickett Morgan, co-founder of The Next Platform, argued that the deal is as much about buying a team as a product; the competitors in world models he listed include NVIDIA’s Cosmos, Tencent’s HunyuanWorld and Google’s Genie 3.⁠[16][16][16][16]

World Labs describes itself as a frontier AI research and product company whose team spans research, engineering, robotics, product, design and business, aiming for a tight feedback loop between frontier research and products; it summarizes the applications of world models as storytelling, creativity, robotics, scientific discovery and more. The investors it lists include a16z, ADIC, AdobeAdobeAdobe (Adobe Inc.) is a software company headquartered in San Jose, California, founded in 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke. Known for PostScript, PDF and creative software such as Acrobat, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro and After Effects, it moved its main creative products to Creative Cloud subscriptions from 2013 and expanded into digital marketing and generative AI; it is listed on Nasdaq under the ticker ADBE.Open the full entry, AMD, Autodesk, Cisco, Databricks, Emerson, Fidelity, Intel, NEA, Nvidia, Radical, Sea, Salesforce, Samsung, Sanabil, Sound, Temasek and Zoom.⁠[1][1][1][1]

World Labs: Official website: https://www.worldlabs.ai/ (opens in a new window).⁠[17]

Marble: Official website: https://marble.worldlabs.ai/ (opens in a new window).⁠[7]

X: Public account: https://x.com/theworldlabs (opens in a new window)⁠[17]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/@worldlabsai (opens in a new window)⁠[17]