Fei-Fei Li's World Labs raised $1B from A16Z, Nvidia to advance its world models

The interesting thing to me about their world models is that it's like a static point cloud model, as opposed to deepmind's genie 3 which feels more like a video generation model at its base. I see the video generation base as generally superior but far more expensive. The current approach for world labs is likely based on the expertise of the founders, but I don't see how it can scale and match what genie 3 does even if it does offer state persistence as an advantage.

https://archive.is/qjsFy

What are the industries that would truly benefit from good world models? Obviously there are benefits for Robotics and Self Driving but what else am I missing?

Headline suggests A16Z, Nvidia as investors, but the article and their own blog suggests Autodesk, AMD etc. as the bigger investors

related:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45923326

https://entropytown.com/articles/2025-11-13-world-model-lecu...

I still want to know the definition of a world model, because it seems that what they are doing now is a very basic model of GS (not sure if it is self-developed) and a GS browser.