Her co-founders, Ben Mildenhall and Kristof Laur, have been at the forefront of related advancements such as NeRF (Neural Radiance Fields), which allows AI to infer 3D shapes from 2D images, further advancing the field of computer vision.

Spatial Intelligence vs. Language Models

Unlike large language models (LLMs), which operate by predicting sequences of tokens in one-dimensional space (text), spatial AI is fundamentally three-dimensional. According to Lee, language is a generated signal—it doesn’t naturally exist in the world—and is a lossy way to convey information about the world. On the other hand, the physical world follows the laws of physics and has inherent structures that AI needs to learn and replicate.