One of AI’s most influential researchers is joining AMD in an $8 billion deal

• AMD is acquiring AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs in an $8.2 billion all-stock deal.
• World Labs builds AI models for 3D environments, robotics, and simulation.
• Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to CEO Lisa Su.

One of modern AI’s most influential researchers is now at the center of AMD’s $8 billion bet on physical AI.

AMD said Monday it had agreed to acquire World Labs, a San Francisco startup cofounded in 2024 by Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock deal valued at roughly $8.2 billion.

World Labs is building so-called “world models,” AI systems that can generate and reconstruct interactive 3D environments from text, images, and video. The technology could eventually be used to train robots, simulate factories, and advance scientific research.

Li, often called the “godmother of AI,” is best known for creating ImageNet, a massive database of labeled images that helped demonstrate how more data could dramatically improve computer vision. She later served as chief scientist for AI and machine learning at Google Cloud and became the founding co-director of Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

Earlier this month, World Labs released Atlas, a new AI model designed to predict how a scene would look from a different camera angle using a small set of 2D images. The company compares the approach to how large language models predict the next word in a sentence.

AMD CEO Lisa Su said in a press release that the acquisition would give the chipmaker deeper insight into how cutting-edge AI models are evolving, helping it build the chips and computing systems needed to power them. AMD is one of Nvidia’s biggest rivals in the AI chip market.

As part of the agreement, Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to Su.

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