The Santa Clara, Calif.-headquartered chip giant announced the all-stock transaction after markets closed Monday. World Labs CEO Fei-Fei Li will become AMD’s chief scientist, and the team will keep building AI models. (The Logic)

Talking point: Li and her co-founders formed the startup in January 2024 to build so-called world models, trained on image and video data to better handle real-life mechanics and simulate the consequences of their actions. Their uses include film and game creation, and robotics controls. The firm raised an initial US$230 million in funding led by Toronto-headquartered Radical Ventures, where Li is both a limited partner and a scientific one. World Labs announced US$1 billion in new financing in February, with backing from both AMD and its chief rival Nvidia. Other investors included star Canadian AI researchers Geoffrey Hinton and Andrej Karpathy. Li herself is one of the field’s most prominent scientists, having established ImageNet, a database that was used to test breakthrough deep learning systems. World Labs is the latest exit in the frothy market of neolabs, as star researchers leave tech giants to launch their own startups pursuing new types of AI models and applications.

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