San Francisco, CA – April 20, 2026 – World Labs, the pioneering spatial intelligence company founded by AI visionary Dr. Fei-Fei Li, has been named to the prestigious Forbes AI 50 list for 2026. The annual ranking highlights the most promising privately held artificial intelligence companies driving the industry forward.
This honor comes as World Labs continues to push the boundaries of AI beyond traditional 2D vision and language models. The company is developing Large World Models (LWMs) — foundational systems that enable machines to perceive, generate, reason about, and interact with three-dimensional environments in a physics-aware, human-like manner. Co-founders Dr. Fei-Fei Li, Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, and Ben Mildenhall bring deep expertise in computer vision, machine learning, and graphics to this ambitious mission.
“Our vision is to move AI from seeing pixels to truly understanding and creating worlds,” said Dr. Li. “Spatial intelligence represents AI’s next frontier — transforming how machines imagine, simulate, and act within reality.”
Central to this vision is Marble, World Labs’ flagship multimodal generative world model. Over the past month, the company has released a series of new product features and capabilities:
- Multimodal World Generation with Marble: Users can generate high-fidelity, persistent, and fully navigable 3D environments from text prompts, single images, videos, 360-degree panoramas, or coarse 3D layouts, with outputs that maintain spatial consistency and physical plausibility.
- Enhanced Editing Capabilities in Marble 1.1: Marble 1.1 and Marble 1.1 Plus delivers improved generation quality, better lighting, fewer artifacts, higher-quality textures, and support for larger, more complex scenes, along with refined real-world unit scaling and grounding.
- 3D as Code Framework: World Labs’ new essay “3D as Code” positions 3D space as the emerging universal interface for both humans and machines — programmable, editable, and shareable like software code — with Marble’s experimental Chisel tool enabling precise 3D conditioning to separate structure from style for greater creative control.
- Spark 2.0 for Web-Native 3D Rendering: Spark 2.0 is a high-performance, open-sourced 3D Gaussian Splatting renderer that streams massive, billion-point 3D worlds directly in web browsers through dynamic Level-of-Detail rendering, progressive loading, and efficient file formats.
- Seamless Export and Integration: Marble worlds can be edited, expanded, and exported as Gaussian splats, meshes, or video for seamless integration into game engines, visual effects pipelines, architecture tools, and downstream applications.
These innovations are already finding applications in filmmaking, gaming, design simulation, robotics training, and beyond. Strategic collaborations, such as with Autodesk, are helping integrate spatial models into real-world workflows for manufacturing, construction, and digital twins.
As the AI industry shifts toward more embodied and practical intelligence — powering robotics, scientific discovery, entertainment, and physical-world simulation — World Labs stands at the forefront. Its inclusion on the Forbes AI 50, alongside recognition as one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies of 2026, highlights the excitement surrounding world models that bridge digital and physical realities.
With a world-class team and a clear roadmap, World Labs continues to attract top talent dedicated to solving the core challenges of spatial AI. For more information, visit www.worldlabs.ai or explore Marble at marble.worldlabs.ai.