World Labs joins AMD, with Fei-Fei Li as Chief Scientist
World Labs Is Joining AMD
World Labs has signed a definitive agreement to join AMD, following a technical partnership on GPU training and inference. Dr. Fei-Fei Li will become Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist, working with CEO Dr. Lisa Su, while Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall continue leading the team. The deal, expected to close by the end of 2026, aims to build an end-to-end open AI ecosystem spanning hardware, software, platforms, and open models.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li will join AMD as an Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist, working directly with CEO Dr. Lisa Su.
- quanto
I hesitate to recast the discussion in a negative tone, but this doesn't sound right on technical terms.
Is World Labs' Atlas genuinely novel? Their demos do not seem to be better than the existing state of the art.
Fei Fei Li has been criticized even in the ImageNet days as a shower than a doer. Her roadshow past two years extolling "world model" in vague terms didn't show much insight, and her company's demo seems to merely rehash what has been available in the field for years. If you haven't seen the current SoTA in Gaussian splats, then World Labs' demos may seem cool, but they are mostly standard in the field now. If someone is more familiar with the inner workings of World Labs, I am happy to be corrected (but inner details wouldn't change the fact that demos are no better than SoTA).
I really had high hopes for World Labs, but I am quite saddened to realize that perhaps all this was just a financial maneuver and the detractors were right from the beginning.
source: I used to be in the downstream field: Gaussian spats for robotics. The exact field that World Labs' is supposed to help.
- anon-sf-23123
Doing this on a throwaway to ask some awkward questions.
Way to go and all, and I suppose the investors got an exit but I still scratch my head on this one. We've seen the rise of World Labs from the beginning to this exit, and still the raw output is barely usable for any conceivable use case.
The raw output from these models is very similar or identical to what you can get to generating a splat from a camera that rotates using minimax or other frontier video models.
I work with clients in real world design contexts and the output from world labs was never usable due to all sorts of distortions and errors and stuff.
So again it's cool, but like what was all this hype about? This was usable in a very niche case if you're making video games with no care for spatial continuity and are okay with super heavy assets.
I am surely missing something as I just black box test these things for applicability in the real world, and I just never found any.
- hydrogenbon007
Curious if there are actual deployments of world labs models, since their focus is spatial intelligence, I'm surprised I haven't seen any partner case studies or robotics benchmarks. Robotics is the obvious ICP for world models.
- LarsDu88
This was absurdly soon.
I was also shocked by how quickly AMD acquired Talaas. AMD may be preparing for the next way (ultra fast inference, and embodied AI inference)
- tomrod
Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-28/amd-to-bu...
Worldlabs PR: https://www.worldlabs.ai/blog/amd-announcement
CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/28/amd-fei-fei-li-world-labs.ht...
Tweet: https://twitter.com/EdLudlow/status/2104664216393420843
- AbuAssar
Is a 2-year-old company worth 8 billion USD?
- calebhwin
Neolabs keep moving down the stack.
Neoclouds want to do neolab things and now chipmakers want to do neolab things
- mptest
Dr Fei Fei Li's book The Worlds I See is a great read about both her life and the history of early AI and her role in it, which is major (Ilya was one of her phd students, along with the Alex of AlexNet) so if you don't already know the history of these systems, it's a great read. Very inspiring stuff. Great read and learned about it here so passing on the good word