AMD to buy World Labs for $8.2B, Fei-Fei Li joins as chief scientist
US chipmaker AMD said it has agreed to buy San Francisco startup World Labs in an all-stock deal valued at about $8.2 billion. World Labs was co-founded in 2024 by Fei-Fei Li and others. It builds "world models" that let AI generate or rebuild interactive 3D environments from text, images and video. The tech could be used for robot training, factory simulation and science research.
Under the deal, Fei-Fei Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to AMD CEO Lisa Su. Li is widely known for creating ImageNet, a large labeled image database that helped show bigger data can greatly improve computer vision. She later served as chief scientist for AI and machine learning at Google Cloud and became a founding co-director of Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute.
Earlier this month, World Labs launched a new AI model called Atlas. It needs only a few 2D images to predict what the same scene would look like from another camera angle. Su said the deal will help AMD better understand how cutting-edge AI models are evolving, so it can build the chips and computing systems needed to run them.
