Fei-Fei Li on Spatial Intelligence and Robotics

Fei-Fei Li on Spatial Intelligence and Robotics – The a16z Show

Market views

Bullish

ROBOTICS— WorldLabs' acquisition of Scenics positions them to build spatial intelligence and world models for robotics, addressing critical bottlenecks in training and evaluation through simulation. The real-to-sim-to-real pipeline enables scalable data generation and systematic coverage of edge cases, unlocking the potential for general-purpose robots in semi-structured environments.
AIMODELS— Foundation models for robotics that incorporate actions as both input and output modalities represent the next evolution of AI. These omni-models will serve as backbones for specific robotic applications, combining multimodal understanding with physical world interaction capabilities.
AMZN— Semi-structured environments like Amazon warehouses represent the most realistic near-term deployment opportunity for robotics, following the historical progression from fully structured (factories) to semi-structured before unstructured environments.

Bearish

ROBOTICS— Aggressive predictions around humanoid robots are unrealistic. Achieving human-level efficiency and capabilities in robotics will take much longer than current market expectations, with fundamental challenges in power efficiency, system integration, and unstructured environment navigation.

Not investment advice.