AMD buys firm founded by AI 'godmother' Fei-Fei Li

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announced on Monday its acquisition of World Labs, an artificial intelligence (AI) company co-founded by Fei-Fei Li, a prominent researcher often called the "Godmother of AI." The deal is valued at around $8.2 billion and will make Li the chief scientist at AMD. Li established World Labs to develop spatial intelligence technology that simulates 3D environments from images, video, and text.

World Labs specializes in world models, which differ from popular AI systems that generate text and images. These models learn how the physical world operates to simulate and predict outcomes, with applications in robotics and virtual simulations.

AMD's MI450 series, developed in collaboration with OpenAI, aims to achieve inference dominance, a shift from training as pre-training effectiveness dwindles due to limited data growth. Li expressed her enthusiasm in a blog post, stating that the acquisition will enable AMD to scale its efforts, expand its reach, and get closer to the hardware necessary for AI advancements.

The acquisition marks a significant milestone for both AMD and Li, with AMD recently becoming the latest equity to reach a $1 trillion valuation due to the AI investment boom. Despite AMD's lower valuation compared to Nvidia, the leading chip company in AI, the demand for AI chips continues to surge.