Chipmaker AMD and global model company World Labs announced that AMD will acquire the AI company by the end of the year, pending regulatory approval. The transaction is valued at $8.2 billion.
In 2024, computer vision scientist Fei-Fei Li founded World Labs with fellow researchers Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, and Ben Mildenhall, with $230 million in funding, part of which came from AMD.
The company has started working on new world models, which are AI models aimed at providing useful and predictive simulation of the physical world. There are competing architectures (earlier this year, Ars interviewed Ben Mildenhall, co-founder of World Labs, and others in the field), but many involve training a model on large amounts of video data.
This was the case for Marble, World Labs’ first publicly available tool. Marble can generate small 3D spaces using Gaussian splashes. They can then be exported as 3D assets for use in film production, game development and other applications. The company has since introduced additional models and tools with different priorities or use cases, such as Atlas.
One use case that has warranted huge investments in the space is the generation of synthetic data for training robots. This is an area in which Nvidia, AMD’s direct competitor, has a solid lead. AMD has previously produced its own AI models, including Micro-World, an open source global model, but has not produced a stack capable of competing with Nvidia’s Cosmos and related models and applications.
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