AMD acquires World Labs AI startup, upping the ante against Nvidia

Chipmaker AMD and world models company World Labs announced that AMD will acquire the AI company by the end of the year, pending regulatory approval. The transaction is valued at $8.2 billion.

In 2024, computer vision scientist Fei-Fei Li founded World Labs with fellow researchers Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, and Ben Mildenhall, with $230 million in funding, some of which came from AMD.

The company began working on new world models, which are AI models that aim to provide a useful, predictive simulation of the physical world. Competing architectures exist (earlier this year, Ars interviewed World Labs co-founder Ben Mildenhall and others in the field about exactly that), but many involve training a model on vast amounts of video data.

That was the case for Marble, World Labs’ first publicly usable tool. Marble can generate small 3D spaces using Gaussian splats. They can then be exported as 3D assets for use in film production, game development, and other applications. The company has since introduced additional models and tools with different emphasis or use cases, such as Atlas.

One use case that has justified enormous investment in the space is generating synthetic data for training robots. That’s a field where Nvidia, AMD’s direct competitor, has a strong lead. AMD has produced its own AI models before, including Micro-World, an open-ith Nvidia’s Cosmos and related models and applications

This acquisition not only brings World Labs’ models under AMD’s roof, it also brings in some of the leading research talent working on these models. According to World Labs’ announcement of the deal, Fei-Fei Li will become Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist at AMD, while “Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall will work with Fei-Fei to continue leading the World Labs team as it joins AMD to form a world-leading frontier research organization.”

While World Labs’ early public successes were in tools and models for content creation (Marble came up a lot at this year’s SIGGRAPH conference for computer graphics), AMD’s focus in its own acquisition announcement seems to be more on the robotics side. “As AI expands into reasoning, robotics, simulation and physical AI, the demands on compute infrastructure become more diverse,” it reads. “World Labs’ expertise in developing advanced models will give AMD deeper insight into how workloads are evolving and help shape its future technology roadmaps.”

World Labs’ acquisition comes sooner than expected for such a young company, but AMD’s involvement shouldn’t be a surprise. The two companies had partnered before, and AMD needs this kind of expertise to compete in an AI chip landscape that Nvidia dominates.

Samuel AxonSenior Editor
Samuel AxonSenior Editor
Samuel Axon is the editorial lead for tech and gaming coverage at Ars Technica. He covers physical and generative AI, large language models, software development, gaming, entertainment, and mixed reality. He has been writing about gaming and technology for nearly two decades at Engadget, PC World, Mashable, Vice, Polygon, Wired, and others. He previously ran a marketing and PR agency in the gaming industry, led editorial for the TV network CBS, and worked on social media marketing strategy for Samsung Mobile at the creative agency SPCSHP. He also is an independent software and game developer for iOS, Windows, and other platforms, and he is a graduate of DePaul University, where he studied interactive media and software development.

Source: arstechnica.com