There was a lot of excitement, last week, when Autodesk announced a $200 million investment in Dr. Fei-Fei Li's World Labs startup.
Just to get this out there from the get-go: I have no special information about this investment - I heard about it at the same time as anyone outside the company, and was in no way involved in negotiations or discussions relating to it. I just thought it helpful to gather together a few references to public information that might be of interest (and of use) to people.
The first reference I found worth a read is this article on TechCrunch, including a Q&A with Autodesk's Chief Scientist (and my Autodesk Research colleague), Daron Green.
Here's a quote from the article that clarifies the relationship between World Labs and Autodesk tech:
He [Daron] mused that customers might like to start with a world-model-based sketch in World Labs (say, of an office layout) and then drill down on certain design aspects (like the design of the desk), which is where Autodesk's tech might come in.
While it's not the specific example I'd have chosen - I've spent enough time, over the years, explaining that the company neither fixes cars (the term "Auto" is used in much of mainland Europe) nor builds office furniture - the idea that the world model could well provide context for design should be 100% clear to people.
I'd recommend watching the Autodesk-related segment in this Bloomberg Tech broadcast (starts at the 10-minute mark and runs for just over 5 minutes):
Our CEO, Andrew Anagnost, goes into some detail about how we're going to share technology with World Labs, and vice-versa. We recently had an employee event where Andrew and Dr. Li sat down for a fireside chat about the investment. While I can't repeat what was discussed, I can say that the discussion has me very motivated to read Dr. Li's book, The World I See, which it turns out I'd bought soon after it came out but hadn't yet gotten around to reading (this is very typical book purchasing behaviour on my part).
If you want to take World Lab's first model, Marble, for a spin, you can do so here. Be sure to play around with the "chisel" mode that allows you to tweak the world during its creation. It seems the world's objects have associated metadata that might enable some really interesting integrations with designed objects and environments, so this is all really quite exciting.
In somewhat related news, Autodesk Research has a new Director of Physics-Informed AI, Nathan Kutz. To learn more about this new role - and how important this is for the company - check out this post on the Autodesk Research blog. I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear that Nathan's team ends up working closely with the folks at World Labs (again - I have no particular knowledge of any concrete plans, but the connection seems obvious).
Finally, I have a "world"-related request for readers of this blog. Kelly, a friend in our Strategic Foresight team, kindly sent me this photo of some vintage Autodesk swag that friends found in a Portland thrift shop and gifted her. (I wonder if this once belonged to Shaan Hurley?) I'm probably going to take it off Kelly's hands, at some point in the future, but - in the meantime - I've been racking my brain to figure out which product team this would have been procured by.
The logo indicates mid- to late-90s… and the globe makes me think of our early GIS offerings: around that time we acquired a South African company and launched a product called Autodesk World. But then it could also have been for the launch of AutoCAD Map (which was built off the AutoCAD SQL Extension, if memory serves me correctly). There's also a chance this related in some way to early versions of the DWF viewer (or perhaps the Whip! Toolkit), as I remember there being a globe logo with arrows.
Does anyone remember this logo, by any chance? Please post a comment, if you have any thoughts!
Update:
Danny Hubbard remembered this as the MapGuide logo (of course!). It's funny how the mind works: while I didn't work with it directly, members of my team were supporting MapGuide developers for many years. These days it's an open source project. Thanks for the pointer, Danny!
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