AMD buys firm founded by researcher Li Feifei

Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) on Monday announced that it has acquired World Labs, an artificial intelligence (AI) company founded by Li Feifei (李飛飛), one of the field’s most prominent researchers, sometimes referred to as “the godmother of AI.”

The deal is valued at about US$8.2 billion and would make Li, a Stanford computer science professor, chief scientist at AMD.

The all-stock transaction is expected to close by the end of the year, subject to regulatory approvals, the companies said in a statement.

World Labs CEO Li Feifei delivers a speech at CES in Las Vegas on Jan. 5.

Photo: Reuters

“The more you understand end to end, the better system you are going to build,” AMD chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) said in a Bloomberg Television interview.

“That’s why we are acquiring World Labs,” Su said. “To have access to the world-class talent Feifei has brought together and bring it together with AMD’s capabilities around hardware, software and systems.”

Li 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 work differently from the popular AI systems that generate text and images. Instead of creating new content, world models learn how the physical world actually works so they can 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. “To do this requires scaling our efforts, widening our reach, and getting closer to the hardware.”

AMD this month became the latest equity to reach a US$1 trillion valuation due to the massive investment boom over AI.

Even with the latest surge, AMD’s valuation significantly trails rival chip company Nvidia Corp, which recently agreed to acquire high-profile AI start-up Hugging Face in a deal valued at about US$13 billion.