AMD to Acquire AI Startup World Labs for $8.2 Billion

<p>Chipmaker AMD and World Labs, a company specializing in world models, 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.</p><p>World Labs was founded in 2024 by computer vision scientist Fei-Fei Li along with researchers Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, and Ben Mildenhall, with $230 million in funding, some of which was provided by AMD.</p><p>The company focuses on developing world models, which are AI models designed to create useful, predictive simulations of the physical world. Competing architectures exist, and earlier this year, Ars Technica interviewed World Labs co-founder Ben Mildenhall and others in the field regarding these models, many of which require training on large amounts of video data.</p>