Chip maker Advanced Micro Devices said Monday it has acquired World Labs, the artificial intelligence company founded by Fei-Fei Li, a Stanford computer science professor and one of the field's most prominent researchers, sometimes described as "The Godmother of AI." The deal is valued at approximately $8.2 billion.
As part of the acquisition, Li will become chief scientist at AMD. She founded World Labs to develop what she calls "spatial intelligence" — technology that can simulate 3D environments from images, video and text.
The company researches so-called world models, which differ from the popular AI systems that generate text and images: rather than producing new content, they learn how the physical world actually works in order to simulate and predict what happens. The research has applications in robotics and virtual simulations.
"Now that we have tangible proof of the possibilities, we want to do everything we can to accelerate the future," Li said in a blog post.
AMD, led by chief executive Lisa Su, has been moving toward inference workloads with its MI450 series, co-developed with OpenAI, as growth in pre-training flattens amid limited data growth.