AMD acquires "godmother of AI's" startup for $8.2 billion
AMD CEO Lisa Su (left) and World Labs founder Fei-Fei LiWorld Labs
Chipmaker AMD is acquiring World Labs, a two-year-old startup focused on physical AI that was cofounded by
industry pioneer Fei-Fei Li. The
$8.2 billion, all-stock deal will give AMD important technology in an emerging branch of AI that could power a new generation of autonomous machines such as robots and self-driving cars.
The acquisition will help AMD—which makes the GPU chips crucial for training and running AI models—design its products for the evolving applications of AI, and help it better compete with archrival Nvidia, which is also expanding into physical AI.
“Together, we’ll combine World Labs’ deep expertise in AI and world models with AMD’s compute leadership to power the future of AI and strengthen the open AI ecosystem,”
AMD CEO Lisa Su said in a
post on X announcing the deal.
World models represent a different approach to creating intelligent software than the large language models being built by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Unlike the text-based data that LLMs are trained on, world models are trained on data such as video that depicts the physical, three-dimensional world. The goal is to create AI that understands how objects move in the physical world—for instance, the way that a ball bounces—a capability that many industry insiders believe will be crucial to extending AI into objects like humanoid robots.
The deal also brings together two of the leading women in the AI industry:
AMD’s Su and World Labs’ Li, who is sometimes referred to as the “godmother of AI” for her work two decades ago creating ImageNet, a massive visual database that helped make deep learning possible. Li will become executive VP and chief scientist at AMD, reporting to Su.
The companies said that World Labs’ team will join AMD as part of the deal, but did not provide specific figures for the number of employees.
AMD said the deal is expected to close by the end of the year, subject to regulatory approvals.
—AO
