Former ByteDance Intern Raises $30M for a World Model Startup

Tian Keyu, a former ByteDance intern, is starting a world model company. The startup has no name or product yet, but it has already raised nearly $30 million from investors like 5Y Capital and IDG Capital, with a $200 million valuation.

World models aim to teach AI to mimic how the real world works, with uses in robots and self-driving. Top names like Fei-Fei Li and Yann LeCun are pushing this field. Tian was once fired by ByteDance for breaking rules. His team now has 10 people and has built a system with 200,000 symbols, planning to feed AI 100 million hours of video.

He was the lead author of a best paper at NeurIPS 2024, which proposed creating images by predicting patches of pixels. He says the method can cut the cost of making one second of video to a tenth or less. The full model is set for 2027.

Funding a company with no name or product shows investors are betting earlier on promising research talent. World Labs, founded by Fei-Fei Li, was bought by AMD for billions of dollars last month.