Bernd Eitel

Leading Communications for KION

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

A 15-year-old girl immigrates to New Jersey from China. Doesn’t speak English. Her parents, both educated engineers back in Chengdu, are now working as cashiers and restaurant cooks. She gets a job washing dishes at a Chinese restaurant to help the family survive.

She gets into Princeton on a full scholarship. Her reaction is so disbelieving she asks two different advisors to verify the acceptance letter is real. Then her mom gets sick, so the family opens a dry cleaning shop in Parsippany. Every weekend for seven years, Fei-Fei Li leaves Princeton’s physics department to run the register, handle inspections, talk to customers, manage billing. Monday through Friday: quantum mechanics problem sets. Saturday and Sunday: sorting other people’s laundry. She later called herself the “CEO” of the dry cleaning business. She kept running it remotely through half of her PhD at Caltech.

In 2007, she proposed building an image dataset so massive her own mentor told her she’d taken the idea “way too far.” Pre-ImageNet, the entire AI field was working with datasets containing a few hundred images. She built one with 15 million. Most researchers at the time believed algorithms were the bottleneck. She bet on data when nobody else would.

By 2012, a team ran a neural network on that dataset and halved the existing error rate overnight. AlexNet on ImageNet became the moment the deep learning era started. Every computer vision product shipping today traces its lineage back to that dataset.

Fast forward to 2024. She starts World Labs. Four months in, $230 million raise, $1 billion valuation. Today, $1 billion more at roughly $5 billion.

The bet investors are making: that the woman who gave AI its eyes with 2D image recognition is about to give it spatial awareness of the 3D physical world. Her new model, Marble, generates persistent 3D environments from text or images. Unlike video generators that fake depth frame by frame, Marble creates actual geometric space where objects stay where you left them.

The investor list tells you everything. AMD and NVIDIA both wrote checks. When the two biggest competing chipmakers both fund the same startup, they’re telling you this workload is coming whether their competitor funds it or not. Autodesk put in $200 million and signed on as strategic advisor, which means they see spatial AI integrating directly into CAD and design workflows within 18 months.

From dry cleaner to ImageNet to a $5 billion spatial intelligence company. Fei-Fei Li has now placed two bets that the rest of the field thought were too early and too big. The first one created modern computer vision. The second one is trying to give machines the ability to understand physics.

If she’s right again, this is the last major unlock before embodied AI actually works.

[Bernd Eitel @BerndEitel]

@elonmuskADO 15

[Bernd Eitel @BerndEitel]

@bueti Zurich

[Bernd Eitel @BerndEitel]

After three days of conferencing, debating and connecting in Lisbon it’s time for this #WebSummit2022 #Lisbon #DigitalMarketing

[FT World News @ftworldnews]

Britain must learn to love boring politics again https://t.co/OJtR05LXIS

[Bloomberg Pursuits @luxury]

From Johnny Cash to The Killers, these are the most-streamed hits of the past 70 years https://t.co/IEfjflgcCk

[Vala Afshar @ValaAfshar]

Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art. —Peter Drucker

[Bernd Eitel @BerndEitel]

Geopolitics is the biggest threat to globalisation https://t.co/h5FctPQ5Iu

[The Guardian @guardian]

‘A great inspiration’: Tributes paid to journalist Ian Jack, who died aged 77 https://t.co/fznyLwD6lJ

[Bernd Eitel @BerndEitel]

A parenting expert shares the 5 toxic mistakes that can make kids more 'selfish and entitled' https://t.co/vlvAp6WAE5

[FT China @ftchina]

Li Qiang, Xi’s right-hand man https://t.co/qjRNZqFLTY

[Bernd Eitel @BerndEitel]

via ⁦@nytopinion⁩ https://t.co/NDi2yXYPcf

[Branko Milanovic @BrankoMilan]

Global income distribution has radically changed in the past 30 years. It now looks almost like a distribution of a single country which is normally bell-shaped (with income in logs on the x-axis). Leaving these niceties aside, it is clear that a global median class has emerged.

[Bernd Eitel @BerndEitel]

China's Party Congress: Stocks, Yuan, Real Estate Buckle Under Covid-Zero Policy - Bloomberg https://t.co/5OO7SSuiNy

[Bernd Eitel @BerndEitel]

The Inevitable Indictment of Donald Trump - The Atlantic https://t.co/rGcnNl1gIK

[Tencent 腾讯 @TencentGlobal]

@tfadell, co-inventor of the iPod and iPhone and author of “Build,” and Tencent Chief eXploration Officer @dwallerstein discuss the need to rethink and reinvent the world’s infrastructure with #sustainability in mind. #TechForGood https://t.co/JXfoi5aOhu

[Bernd Eitel @BerndEitel]

How AI systems can help deliver on Europe's energy savings goals – @EURACTIV https://t.co/8lAm1rk72G

[Arcane @arcaneshow]

Honored doesn’t even begin to describe how we feel about winning the #Emmy for 𝑶𝒖𝒕𝒔𝒕𝒂𝒏𝒅𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝑨𝒏𝒊𝒎𝒂𝒕𝒆𝒅 𝑷𝒓𝒐𝒈𝒓𝒂𝒎.

Thank you to our incredible team at @RiotGames and Fortiche, the @TelevisionAcad, and the greatest fans (yes, you) for making this possible.

[gamescom @gamescom]

gamesbot is saying goodbye to #gamescom2022.
See you all in 2023 ♥️

[Asia Society Switzerland @AsiaSocietyCH]

The next #OxfordDebate topic's here: 𝗪𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗖𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗮 𝗪𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗥𝗮𝗰𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗦𝘂𝗽𝗿𝗲𝗺𝗮𝗰𝘆 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝗲𝗺𝗶𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗿 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻?
If you don't know what semiconductors are or why they're so important – we got you with a quick explainer 🧵⬇️: