AI News Feed
Market watch
Agentic AI Moves Into Everyday Work as European Startups Raise €7.9bnApple Watch Series 12 Review Finds Health Gains, Larger Bezels and Slow China ChargingProsperoEden Emulator Runs Switch Games Natively on a Jailbroken PS5Lloyds to Roll Out Get Paid Invoicing Tool for UK Business CustomersLee Says South Korea's Three Megaprojects Depend on Living Conditions for WorkersKnowin Raises Another Angel Round, Total Funding Passes 1 Billion Yuan in First Year
Agentic AI Moves Into Everyday Work as European Startups Raise €7.9bnApple Watch Series 12 Review Finds Health Gains, Larger Bezels and Slow China ChargingProsperoEden Emulator Runs Switch Games Natively on a Jailbroken PS5Lloyds to Roll Out Get Paid Invoicing Tool for UK Business CustomersLee Says South Korea's Three Megaprojects Depend on Living Conditions for WorkersKnowin Raises Another Angel Round, Total Funding Passes 1 Billion Yuan in First Year
AI Chips & Compute

AMD to Buy Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2 Billion, Names Her Chief Scientist

AMD has agreed to acquire Fei-Fei Li's World Labs in an $8.2 billion all-stock deal, with Li joining as executive vice president and chief scientist reporting to CEO Lisa Su.

AI News Feed · 2026-09-29 18:10

World Labs was founded in early 2024 by Li, Ben Mildenhall and Justin Johnson. The roughly 70-person team works on spatial intelligence, a field focused on whether AI can understand the physical world rather than only language. In an announcement, Li wrote that 'the universe is not made of words but of real things,' adding that science, entertainment and robotics all require models to understand object positions, spatial structure and how environments change with viewpoint or action.

AMD said World Labs is developing spatial intelligence models that can generate, reconstruct and simulate interactive three-dimensional environments from text, image and video inputs, while also researching robot learning and simulation. The startup acquired SceniX in July to add robot simulation capabilities.

A recent result is Atlas, which Li described as trained from scratch and combining generative models with multi-view geometry. Large language models predict the next token; Atlas, given a two-dimensional image, predicts what would be seen if a camera moved to another position. Li said Atlas outperforms some specialized models on related tasks and has made progress on sparse reconstruction, a long-standing computer vision problem of inferring unseen space from a few photographs. Predicting new viewpoints does not mean the model has mastered all physical laws, according to the announcement.

Li listed possible uses including robot reinforcement learning in generated environments, therapy and entertainment scenes, and reconstruction of real spaces for real estate, design and architecture.

The acquisition also reflects a growing need for computing power. Li wrote that scaling World Labs' work and moving closer to hardware are necessary for spatial intelligence to leave digital environments. Li said Su was an early investor in World Labs and a longtime friend, and the two companies have spent the past year optimizing model training and inference on AMD GPUs. AMD said World Labs' model research will help it observe changing workloads as AI moves into inference, robotics, simulation and physical AI, and influence future technology roadmaps.

Su said: 'The deeper your understanding end to end, the better systems you can build. That is why we are acquiring World Labs.' She said AMD's ambition is to 'define the future of AI computing.' AMD plans to offer both open and proprietary models, and the companies intend to build an AI ecosystem spanning hardware, software, platforms and open models.

The deal puts AMD in a different position from Nvidia, which remains dominant in AI accelerators. Ifanr reported that Nvidia recently acquired Hugging Face for $13 billion to strengthen its open-source developer ecosystem around text and large language models. AMD and World Labs are aiming at spatial intelligence, robotics and simulation, workloads whose computing needs may differ from today's chat models. After the deal closes, World Labs' team will continue focusing on model research, while Li will also take part in AMD's technical leadership.