AMD acquires AI legend Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2 billion

AMD has reached a deal to purchase AI research firm World Labs for approximately $8.2 billion in an all-stock transaction. World Labs co-founder Fei-Fei Li will assume the positions of executive vice president and chief scientist at AMD, reporting directly to CEO Lisa Su. The acquisition awaits final regulatory approval. Su emphasizes the need for deep comprehension of AI model evolution, a requirement Li confirms, stating that advancing AI necessitates collaboration across model research, systems, and compute.

Li, who previously spearheaded the ImageNet project in the 2010s and served as Google Cloud's chief scientist and director of Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, underscores the importance of hardware compatibility for AI efficiency. World Labs specializes in "spatial-intelligence models that generate, reconstruct, and simulate interactive 3D environments," beneficial for robotics and simulation applications.

Their first commercial product, Marble, launched recently, creates persistent, downloadable 3D worlds from source material. AMD and World Labs have previously collaborated to optimize World Labs' AI models' training and inference. Li's team utilized AMD's Instinct accelerators and ROCm software stack to enhance performance. This partnership highlights AMD's commitment to strengthening an "open AI ecosystem."

Li's co-founders, Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall, will continue their roles with World Labs following Li's transition to AMD.