Li will become AMD’s new chief scientist and executive vice-president.
AMD has agreed to acquire AI pioneer Dr Fei-Fei Li’s start-up World Labs in an $8.2bn deal, as physical AI systems further prove their commercial capabilities across areas such as autonomous driving and the factory floor.
World Labs describes itself as a “spatial intelligence company” whose models can “perceive, generate, reason and interact with virtual and physical worlds”. Its flagship product, Marble, generates 3D virtual worlds from image or text prompts.
Li, one of the industry’s leading minds and the founding director of the Stanford Human-Centered AI institute, will be joining AMD as its chief scientist and executive vice-president, reporting directly to the company’s chair and CEO Dr Lisa Su.
The AMD chief was an early investor in World Labs and is a long-term “believer” in its mission, Li wrote in a blogpost yesterday (28 September). World Labs’ team of about 70 employees will also join the semiconductor giant following the acquisition. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year.
Li said that her start-up, which she co-founded with AI researchers Ben Mildenhall and Justin Johnson in 2024, began a “deep technical partnership” with AMD last year.
“As our teams worked together, we realised what a natural fit it would be to bring together our AI ecosystem of software and hardware, foundation models and applications,” she wrote.
Earlier this year, the San Francisco-based start-up raised $1bn in a round backed by Nvidia, AMD and Autodesk, among others, at a reported $5bn valuation. Autodesk invested $200m in World Labs as part of the round, and picked up an advisory role in the company.
Li backed US AI robotics company Generalist in its recent $400m round that also saw participation from Nvidia’s venture arm NVentures, Jeff Bezos’s Bezos Expeditions and Zoom CEO Eric Yuan.
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