Descriptions:
Last week, World Labs announced its acquisition of SceniX, bringing together two teams working on one of AI’s biggest unsolved problems: how to give machines a true understanding of the physical world.
Martin Casado sits down with Fei-Fei Li, co-founder and CEO of World Labs, creator of ImageNet, and pioneer of spatial intelligence, alongside Yunzhu Li, co-founder of SceniX and assistant professor at Columbia University. They discuss why World Labs acquired SceniX, how simulation can unlock the next generation of robotics, and why training robots may require a fundamentally different approach than training language models.
The conversation explores real-to-sim-to-real pipelines, world models, robotics foundation models, evaluation, synthetic data, and why the future of AI depends not just on understanding language—but on understanding and interacting with the physical world.
Timestamps:
00:00 – Intro
01:08 – World Labs & SceniX
06:04 – Marble & the Data Bottleneck in Robotics
07:13 – How the Two Teams Come Together
10:55 – Building a Foundation Model for Robotics
12:35 – Video Models vs Real-to-Sim-to-Real
19:38 – Why Simulation is Essential for Robot Learning
23:01 – Training, Evaluation & Real Customer Use Cases
29:17 – Humanoids, Semi-Structured Environments & the Grand Challenge
36:56 – Integration Plans & What Success Looks Like in Two Years
Resources:
Follow Fei-Fei Li on X: https://x.com/drfeifei
Follow Yunzhu Li on X: https://x.com/YunzhuLiYZ
Follow Martin Casado on X: https://x.com/martin_casado
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