AMD acquires World Labs AI startup, upping the ante against Nvidia
Chipmaker AMD and world models 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, some of which came from AMD.
The company began working on new world models, which are AI models that aim to provide a useful, predictive simulation of the physical world. Competing architectures exist (earlier this year, Ars interviewed World Labs co-founder Ben Mildenhall and others in the field about exactly that), but many involve training a model on vast amounts of video data.
