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.