AMD will acquire Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs for $8.2 billion

AMD is acquiring World Labs, one of the leading developers of deep learning models intended to understand physical reality, in a $8.2 billion deal, the two companies said today.

World Labs justified the deal in a statement saying that AI development required “close collaboration across model research, systems and compute.” AMD, in turn, says that understanding frontier workloads, like those created at World Labs, will shape its chip-making roadmap.

The acquisition will see World Labs founder Fei-Fei Li join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist. AMD and World Labs formed an inference optimization-and-training partnership last year, and ties have remained close. Notably, Li was a guest at AMD’s CES presentation earlier this year.

Li, a Stanford computer science professor, is considered a pioneer in AI, particularly computer vision, for her work building the ImageNet database and the AI competitions it inspired. In 2024, Li founded World Labs to develop deep learning models with a more robust understanding of the physical world, arguing that true general intelligence required a grounding in physics and the ability to understand and reason about data beyond text.

In a post announcing the deal, Li described the partnership as the result of a desire to scale World Labs’ technical breakthroughs beyond the lab. “Now that we have tangible proof of the possibilities, we want to do everything we can to accelerate the future,” Li wrote in the post. “To do this requires scaling our efforts, widening our reach, and getting closer to the hardware.”