Ben Mildenhall, Justin Johnson and Fei-Fei Li, the co-founders of World Labs, joined a16z General Partner Martin Casado on the venture firm’s own podcast, published September 4, to talk through the thinking behind Atlas, the world model AI Insiders covered on September 2. The setting is worth naming plainly: a16z is an investor in World Labs, and the interview was conducted by one of the firm’s own general partners.
The technical bet at the center, per a16z’s episode summary, goes by the name new view prediction. Show the model some images of a scene, and it predicts how that scene would look from a position it was never shown, merging image generation and spatial reconstruction into one operation instead of two.
The summary also says the founders covered dynamics, editability and simulation, with applications floated in architecture and robotics. Fei-Fei Li’s stated view, as a16z describes it, is that getting hold of enough real-world training data is now one of the field’s tightest limits.
Landing three days after Runway’s GWM Worlds 2 launch, the episode reads less as news than as the World Labs team narrating its own bet to a friendly, invested host.
This is drawn from The a16z Show, episode E1188 (published September 4, 2026), on which World Labs’ Ben Mildenhall, Justin Johnson and Fei-Fei Li spoke with a16z General Partner Martin Casado.
