AMD acquires AI legend Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2 billion

AMD has agreed to acquire AI model research firm World Labs in an all-stock purchase worth around $8.2 billion. World Labs co-founder Fei-Fei Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to CEO Lisa Su. The deal will be finalized once it passes the usual regulatory hurdles.

Su says building compute platforms for the next generation of AI requires “a deep understanding of how models are evolving,” and Li says advancing the technology “requires close collaboration across model research, systems and compute,” and wrote in a separate post that World Labs needs to get “closer to the hardware,” without which AI is “hobbled in efficiency.”

Before founding World Labs, Li had already established herself as a luminary in AI research and development. She led the vital ImageNet project in the 2010s and has served as the chief scientist of AI and machine learning at Google Cloud and the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. …