Fei-Fei Li says running Fei-Fei Li World Labs has drawn out what she calls her ‘tiger mom’ instincts, a management style shaped, she says, by being by far the most senior person in a company full of talented but young co-founders, engineers and researchers. Li made the remarks in an interview with Bloomberg released on Wednesday.
From ImageNet to World Labs: the funding story so far
Li cofounded World Labs in 2024. The startup is developing ‘world models’ designed to help AI understand and interact with 3D environments, a field its team describes as spatial intelligence: the ability to reason about how the 3D world works, rather than relying on 2D data such as flat images or text, as CGTN has reported.
The company has moved quickly on the capital side. Li raised $230 million in September 2024 to get World Labs off the ground, according to Reuters. Earlier this year, the company announced a further $1 billion in new funding, with investors including AMD, Autodesk, and Nvidia. That trajectory from seed to billion-dollar raise in well under two years places World Labs among the faster-capitalised startups in the current AI cycle.
The company has also shipped its first product. Marble, which launched late last year, generates interactive, high-fidelity 3D environments from images, video, or text inputs, according to MLQ News. That positions the startup not merely as a research outfit but as one beginning to put spatial-intelligence tooling into the hands of users.
Fei-Fei Li World Labs leadership: high standards, no God complex
Li, who is known for creating ImageNet and has been called the ‘Godmother of AI’, told Bloomberg that her seniority within the company has placed her in an unavoidably parental role. ‘I’m by far the most senior in the company,’ she said. ‘From my co-founders to my engineers, and researchers, and scientists, they’re so talented, but they’re also young.’
‘I do feel like a mom,’ she added. ‘And oftentimes I feel like a tiger mom. I do run this shop as, I would say, high standard.’
The term ‘tiger mom’ generally describes a highly demanding and strict parent who pushes for discipline and high achievement. It was popularised by Amy Chua in her 2011 memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which detailed her strict approach to raising her daughters, including demanding top grades and intensive music practice.
Yet Li is careful to distinguish between holding high standards and confusing seniority with omniscience. ‘As a CEO, as an entrepreneur, our founding premise is we are here to contribute to society and to empower people,’ she said. ‘I don’t think having a God complex is constructive, and I wouldn’t want to do that myself.’ The distinction matters in a sector where founder mythology can crowd out the operational rigour that actually ships products.
Mentorship as a recurring mode
The ‘tiger mom’ framing is not entirely new territory for Li. In a 2025 podcast, she said she found herself slipping into mentoring mode even during job candidate conversations, noting that applicants tended to overfocus on small details of their career decisions rather than the bigger picture.
‘Sometimes I do want to encourage young people to focus on what’s important because I find myself constantly in mentoring mode when I talk to job candidates,’ she said. ‘Not necessarily recruiting, but just in mentoring mode.’
Her counsel, as she described it: think about where passion lies, whether a company’s mission and team resonate, and what kind of impact a role could enable. For Li, those questions appear to frame how she assesses her own team at World Labs just as much as how she advises outsiders.
World Labs is expected to continue building out its spatial-intelligence product suite, with Marble now in the market as its opening commercial statement and $1 billion in fresh capital to press the work forward.