AMD is acquiring World Labs, a leading developer of deep learning models aimed at understanding physical reality, in an $8.2 billion deal, the two companies said today. World Labs justified the deal in a statement by saying that the development of AI required “close collaboration between modeling, systems and computing research.” AMD, in turn, says that understanding cutting-edge workloads, like those created at World Labs, will shape its chip manufacturing roadmap. With the acquisition, World Labs founder Fei-Fei Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist. AMD and World Labs formed a partnership for inference optimization and training last year, and the ties have remained close. Notably, Li was invited to AMD’s presentation at CES earlier this year. Li, a Stanford computer science professor, is considered a pioneer in AI, particularly computer vision, for her work building the ImageNet database and the AI competitions it inspired. In 2024, Li founded World Labs to develop deep learning models with a stronger 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 a post announcing the deal, Li described the partnership as the result of a desire to take 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 the post. “To do this requires expanding our efforts, expanding our reach and getting 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 sustaining a high-fidelity simulation of reality. World Labs’ first product, Marble, is presented as a tool to create entertainment experiences, but also to create simulated environments for training robots. The acquisition is likely to help AMD compete with former rival Nvidia in creating an ecosystem for AI-specific chips. While Nvidia already has a set of open-weight global models like Cosmos, AMD has only offered text- and video-based models to the public. World models are considered vital in efforts to implement generative AI models in robotic platforms, from autonomous vehicles to industrial robots and general-purpose humanoids. In particular, the dearth of useful real-world data for training general-purpose robots means that synthetic data from global models will be key to realizing the vision put forward by companies like Tesla and Figure. The acquisition is expected to close before the end of the year, subject to regulatory approval. When you buy through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect our editorial independence.
