Fei Fei Li: The Race to Build World Models For AI

On the path to spatial intelligence, generating pixels that are truly spatially contextualized and grounded, that is the very hard step that Atlas has taken. You know LLMs are built on NEXT token prediction. We've seen video models as being built on frame prediction. Atlas is really new view prediction. This is the real place where AI can actually unlock a ton of value for people and their process. We're saying, like, 50, a 100 x reduction. There was a famous shot in the first Matrix movie where Neo is, like, falling down. Exactly. They had hundreds of cameras viewing that angle on a green screen. On Atlas, we can do this with just three cameras. No studio capture, no green screen, no expensive calibration. No one has ever seen this result. When you set out to do this, did you know it was gonna work? I was pretty sure. Each time we made the model bigger and each time we trained it for longer, it got significantly better. Does that mean we're gonna get four d video? Do I go walk around? Language models are built around predicting the next token. What happens when a model instead learns to predict the next view of the world? In this episode, Martin Casado sits down with World Labs cofounders Fei Fei Li, Justin Johnson, and Ben Mildenhall to discuss Atlas and the broader challenge of building AI that can reason about physical space. They explain how Atlas combines generation and three d reconstruction, why the team chose NewView prediction as its underlying primitive, and what they learned trying to scale an approach that hadn't been tested before. They also get into what's still missing, including richer dynamics and interaction, and how world models could eventually connect simulation with robotics and planning. Underlying it all is a bigger hypothesis. Could new view prediction play a similar role for spatial intelligence that next token prediction has played for language? So big day yesterday, you launched a new frontier model, which has got amazing reception, which is still coming in. I think maybe a good way to structure this conversation, let's just talk about exactly what that was, and then we'll go back to history and work our way back up. So maybe, Justin, you wanna talk about what was launched yesterday, why it's significant? Yeah. So Atlas is our new next generation world model. It has three basic things. It can generate, reconstruct, and simulate the world. So within that, there's a couple different major capabilities. It has really good camera condition generation. So you can input an image together with a camera trajectory and steer the model and have it generate video frames, mark any perspective you want. It's really good at sparse three d reconstruction. You can input one or multiple up to a 100 frames that are views of the real world and use those to reconstruct the real world, and that reconstruction can take the case either of novel …