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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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Rya is a senior reporter at Business Insider covering physical AI and robotics. She writes about factory automation, humanoid robots, and the race to collect the real-world data needed to bring AI into the physical world. She previously worked at The San Francisco Standard, where she reported on tech culture and autonomous vehicles. She has a bachelor’s degree from Pomona College and a master’s from the University of Cambridge. Rya lives in San Francisco. Contact her at [email protected] or on Signal at rjetha.07. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device. Here's our guide to sharing information securely.
