Caroline Hyde

First, we kind of share a common ethos.

We believe that AI can enhance and expand human ingenuity, not replace it.

And that's something that both World Labs and Autodesk share in common.

But more importantly, Fei-Fei Li, Autodesk, others believe that the next frontier are world models.

This is the ability to simulate, predict, and react to real-world constraints

and virtual changes in real-world constraints, virtual changes of design constraints within a virtual environment.

That means you really have to partner with someone that's got deep expertise in spatial reasoning for AI.

That's why we picked working with World Labs, and they picked us because we have deep expertise and deep data knowledge of what happens in a design and make process.

The technical challenge is to apply the physics of the real world into the virtual world, particularly when you're trying to simulate.

I'm assuming that beyond the investment, there is a commercial arrangement here, right, where you're able to do something with World Labs technology.

How does that manifest?

Yeah, so we're going to be working together with using World Labs technology with our tools.

They're also going to get access to some of the proprietary models that we've built so that we can help them expand and create their ability to do deep spatial reasoning.

So you'll see us initially lean into the media and entertainment space.

But as you said, this is much more expansive than that.

At Autodesk, we're really interested in the mid-market manufacturing space and mid-market factories, small and mid-sized factories in particular.

This is going to be a high growth area.

And these factories are going to need to be able to operate like the biggest factories in the world, but at a much smaller scale.

And they need technology from us and technology from World Labs to do that.

You put out the announcement about the $200 million part of the strategic investment.