AMD announced the acquisition of World Labs, a leading developer of deep learning models designed to understand physical reality, in a $8.2 billion deal. The acquisition aims to strengthen AMD's position in AI chip development by integrating World Labs' expertise in world models.
World Labs founder Fei-Fei Li, a Stanford computer science professor, will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist. Li, known for her work on the ImageNet database and AI competitions, founded World Labs in 2024 to create deep learning models with a stronger grasp of the physical world.
"Now that we have tangible proof of the possibilities, we want to do everything we can to accelerate the future," Li wrote in a post announcing the deal. "To do this requires scaling our efforts, widening our reach, and getting closer to the hardware."
The acquisition follows a close partnership between AMD and World Labs, which began with an inference optimization-and-training collaboration last year. Li was also a guest at AMD’s CES presentation earlier this year, highlighting the strong ties between the two companies.
World models, a loosely defined category, include language models trained to understand visual inputs and models capable of generating high-fidelity simulations. World Labs’ first product, Marble, is designed for entertainment experiences and robot training environments.
AMD’s move is expected to help it compete with Nvidia in creating an AI-specific chip ecosystem. While Nvidia has open-world models like Cosmos, AMD has only offered text- and video-based models to the public. The acquisition is likely to close before the end of the year, pending regulatory approval.
Source: techcrunch
