AMD is acquiring World Labs, a leading developer of deep learning models for understanding physical reality, in an $8.2 billion deal, the two companies announced today.
World Labs justified the agreement in a statement saying that developing AI required “close collaboration between model, systems and computation research.” AMD, in turn, says that understanding cutting-edge workloads, like those created at World Labs, will shape its chipmaking roadmap.
This acquisition will see World Labs founder Fei-Fei Li join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist. AMD and World Labs formed an inference optimization and training partnership last year, and the ties have remained close. Li was notably invited to AMD’s presentation at CES earlier this year.
Li, a computer science professor at Stanford, is considered a pioneer in AI, particularly computer vision, for her work creating the ImageNet database and the AI competitions it inspired. In 2024, Li founded World Labs to develop deep learning models with a more robust understanding of the physical world, arguing that true general intelligence required a foundation in physics and the ability to understand and reason about data beyond text.
In an article announcing the deal, Li described the partnership as the result of a desire to extend World Labs’ technical advances beyond the laboratory. “Now that we have tangible evidence of the possibilities, we want to do everything we can to accelerate the future,” Li wrote in his message. “To achieve this, we need to step up our efforts, expand our reach and get closer to the hardware. »
“World model” remains a loosely defined term, encompassing everything from language models trained to understand visual input to models capable of generating and maintaining a high-fidelity simulation of reality. World Labs’ first product, Marble, is touted as a tool for creating entertainment experiences, but also creating simulated environments for training robots.
The acquisition will likely help AMD compete with longtime rival Nvidia by creating an ecosystem for AI-specific chips. While Nvidia already offers a suite of open world models like Cosmos, AMD has only offered text and video-based models to the public.
Global models are considered critical to efforts to deploy generative AI models across robotics platforms, from autonomous vehicles to general-purpose industrial and humanoid robots. In particular, the lack of useful real-world data for training general-purpose robots means that synthetic data from global models will be critical to realizing the vision put forward by companies like Tesla and Figure.
The acquisition is expected to be completed before the end of the year, subject to regulatory approval.
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