Chipmaker AMD and global modeling company World Labs announced that AMD will acquire the artificial intelligence company before 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 artificial intelligence models that aim to provide a useful and predictive simulation of the physical world. There are competing architectures (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 with large amounts of video data.
That was the case with Marble, World Labs’ first publicly used tool. Marble can generate small 3D spaces using Gaussian symbols. They can then be exported as 3D assets for use in film production, game development, and other applications. Since then, the company has introduced additional models and tools with different emphases or use cases, such as Atlas.
One use case that has justified huge investment in this space is the generation of synthetic data to train robots. That’s an area where Nvidia, AMD’s direct competitor, has a strong advantage. AMD has produced its own AI models before, including Micro-World, an open source world model, but has not produced a stack that competes with Nvidia Cosmos and related models and applications.
