AMD spends 8.2 billion USD to buy the company of 'AI godmother'

AMD announced the new agreement on September 28 and said it would pay World Labs entirely in shares, worth $8.2 billion. Accordingly, Ms. Fei-Fei Li will join the chip company as Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist, reporting directly to CEO Lisa Su.

Ms. Su shared that acquiring World Labs will help them better understand how advanced AI models are developing, allowing them to build the chips and computer systems needed to operate them. Business Insider estimates that AMD is currently one of Nvidia's biggest competitors in the AI ​​chip market.

In a social media post on September 28, Fei-Fei Li called Lisa Su a "great friend". "We are steadfast in our mission, and even more excited to continue building a world-leading advanced technology research organization that will grow sustainably for decades to come," she wrote.

Fei-Fei Li, a Chinese-American, is one of the most influential researchers in the field of modern artificial intelligence. From a poor immigrant girl, she strived to become a leading computer scientist, while fighting for gender equality and racial diversity.

She graduated from Princeton University in 1999 with a major in physics, received a doctorate from the California Institute of Technology in 2005, and became a full professor at Stanford University in 2018. In 2024, she was named in the main prize - the VinFuture global annual science and technology award worth 3 million USD along with four other scientists, for her pioneering contributions in the field of computer vision and developing the ImageNet data set.

In the same year 2024, Ms. Li co-founded World Labs, a startup that develops "world models", a term for AI systems with the ability to create and reconstruct interactive 3D environments from text, images, and videos. Technology can help train robots, simulate factories and promote scientific research.

In early September, World Labs released Atlas, a new AI model designed to predict what a scene will look like from a different camera angle, based on a small set of 2D images. The startup likens this method to the way large language models predict the next word in a sentence.

According to Reuters, also in September, AMD became the latest name to join the $1,000 billion capitalization club, when investors believed in the company's role in the AI ​​wave. The company is accelerating the launch of artificial intelligence products, while shifting from just selling individual chips to offering complete systems - combining processors, networking equipment and related hardware - to compete with Nvidia. Growing demand for central processing units (CPUs) also helps AMD gain more market share from Intel.