I feel like a lot of the good that projects like this do get muddied by the overly ambitious claims.
Fei-Fei Li is a luminary in the field, and she's assembled a stellar team of some of the best researchers in the space.
Their gamble is that they'll be able to move faster than the open research and other companies looking to productionize that research.
Time will tell if this can become an ElevenLabs or if it'll fizzle out like Character.ai.
My worry is that without a product, they'll malinvestment their research into cool problems that don't satisfy market demand. There's nothing like the north star of customers. They'll also have a tough time with hiring going forward with that valuation.
The market of open research and models is producing a lot of neat stuff in 3D. But there's no open pool of data yet, despite HuggingFace and others trying.
We'll see what happens.
What would have to be true for this to be worth $100 billion after 5-10 years?
That money will go fast though, given GPU costs and salary ranges in the bay
Before: You and your cofounders share 100% of the stock in your company that's valued at $X.
After: Your company now has everything it had before plus $Y worth of "something" from the VCs. Your company is now valued at $X plus $Y. The VCs now hold stock in your company worth $Y. You and your cofounders still hold stock your company worth $X.
"Something" might be anything. Cash, stocks, commitments to resources, whatever.