AMD acquires World Labs, appoints AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li as chief scientist

AMD has announced it is buying the AI startup World Labs in an all-stock deal, about $8.2 billion. World Labs was started in April 2024 by Dr. Fei-Fei Li, who is widely known as the "Godmother of AI." The company works on creating "world models " which are AI systems that can build and interact with 3D environments.

As part of the agreement Fei-Fei Li will join AMD as Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist. Li is one of the prominent figures in the field of AI. She is largely credited with developing ImageNet, a large-scale image dataset that helped create the computer vision technology enabling computers to identify objects. Today ImageNet is considered a cornerstone of machine learning.

Meanwhile, the World Labs team will continue to focus on advancing AI model research as part of AMD. "It is very clear that the right path for me and for World Labs is to continue our mission as part of AMD," Fei-Fei Li wrote on Substack.

AMD states that this acquisition will enable the company to work on developing new systems for the future of AI. "Fei-Fei and the World Labs team bring exceptional research leadership and model expertise," said Dr. Lisa Su, CEO of AMD. "Together, we can leverage that expertise to develop the hardware, software, and systems that will power the next generation of AI and strengthen the open AI ecosystem."

AMD to develop new AI systems through agreement with World Labs

This agreement brings AMD closer to the development of AI models at a time when chipmakers are working to define the next phase of AI infrastructure. World Labs focuses on "world models" that go beyond large language models (LLMs) like Claude or GPT. Instead, these models can generate and simulate interactive 3D environments from text, image, and video inputs. This could enable real-world applications in fields such as robotics, simulation, design, and video games.

World Labs recently unveiled Atlas -an omni-model architecture for predicting camera views. Previously, the startup launched Marble, a world-generation model that allows for the creation of interactive 3D environments from a text prompt.

Through the agreement with World Labs, AMD gains expertise in world models as AI expands into reasoning, robotics, simulation, and physical AI; meanwhile, Li stated that the joint group will continue "pushing the boundaries of AI to solve real-world problems" and will do so "in an open manner, together with the community and the entire ecosystem."

The AI industry represents a key market for chipmakers, given that data centres incorporate large GPU clusters to train and run AI models. However, these manufacturers are now delving deeper into AI development. AMD's agreement with World Labs comes just days after Nvidia announced the acquisition of the AI platform Hugging Face for nearly $13 billion. Nvidia is already developing its own AI models. For its part, AMD has also made acquisitions to expand its AI ecosystem; these include the purchase of AI infrastructure company ZT Systems in 2025 and the Finnish AI lab Silo AI in 2024.

It should be noted that the acquisition by AMD is subject to regulatory approvals and is expected to close later this year. AMD was already an investor in World Labs.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kahekashan

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Kahekashan is a passionate technophile with a keen eye for cutting-edge gadgets, emerging technologies, and everything in the digital realm. Raised in a Defence family with strong values and a background in literature, she has consistently pursued excellence in every endeavour. Her last full-time assignment involved content writing with the Indian School of Business.

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