World Labs Is Joining AMD

(worldlabs.ai)

112 points | by mfiguiere 1 hour ago

13 comments

  • LarsDu88 22 minutes ago
    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)

    • ahartmetz 15 minutes ago
      AMD has acquired "AI stuff" for several billions at this point, yet somehow, doing "AI stuff" on their GPU/NPU stack still seems to be troublesome. Well, that is what I read from others anyway. Inference with llama.cpp on AMD GPUs pretty much just works.
      • amelius 9 minutes ago
        I bet soon enough we can just ask AI to port stuff from CUDA to whatever language AMD is using. This is how nVidia will become a victim of their own success.
    • echelon 17 minutes ago
      Other embodied labs are less gamer-y/consumer-y. WorldLabs didn't know whether to be a consumer tool, a creative tooling company, a robotics research lab.

      Investors who have seen their materials told me this was their direct feeling.

    • cyanydeez 18 minutes ago
      If the sigmoid approacheth, the first one to get a good model into silicon, at acceptable benchmarks and silicon rejection %, will make some truckloads. Most people don't need SOTA for most of their problems.

      the TAM might be a real number, but the addressee might already be walking around, such as any qwen3.8 model. Qwen3.8-Flash-Next is churning out some fascinating capabilities as we speak.

      There's only so many math problems you can solve without ROI.

  • Mr_P 8 minutes ago
    Congrats to the team on such a successful exit!

    I'm curious how much the recent AI 3D modeling trend (Astra post-trained to use Blender) would have impacted this.

    World Labs' entire tech stack becomes potentially obsolete when anyone can prompt GPT/Claude to create a simulation-ready 3D model from a photograph.

  • calebhwin 1 hour ago
    Neolabs keep moving down the stack.

    Neoclouds want to do neolab things and now chipmakers want to do neolab things

    • JumpCrisscross 38 minutes ago
      > Neoclouds want to do neolab things and now chipmakers want to do neolab things

      We don't know what the right integrations are. Is it the chipmakers with the toolmakers? The front-end makers with the model designers? That's the current set-up. But there might be another industrial configuration that is superior.

      AMD is still struggling to establish itself in AI. That makes it a worthy competitor. Its agglomeration of talent and resources is probably, knowing little else, good.

  • AbuAssar 1 hour ago
    Is a 2-year-old company worth 8 billion USD?
    • kylecazar 40 minutes ago
      The past couple of years have really driven home the fact that a company is worth what someone will pay for it
    • ianm218 16 minutes ago
      AMD grew their revenue 50% last quarter from the year prior, for 11.5B in revenue. If this team can help continue that or grow that then yes - the amount of money involved here is insane.
    • Glemmlko 19 minutes ago
      Honestly, I think this 'billion' number is also just the ball park for companies you need to pay if you want to buy them.

      OpenRouter was sold for 7.5 Billion.

      Lets just accept, that these people don't evaluate a company by value but by magic market "what is a sum someone needs to pay for buying a company and what company is somehow worth it to actually buy for this type of money but more in a sense of adding this to your portfolio"

    • tintor 10 minutes ago
      Could be if they are pre-revenue.
    • avaer 1 hour ago
      A name like Fei-Fei Li is probably worth a chunk of that (I'm not saying I agree, but that's probably the thinking).

      It's a public bet, not a valuation based on product economics. Billion dollar bets follow different rules (and I'm not saying it's sane).

  • tomrod 1 hour ago
  • esalman 1 hour ago
    Given a lot of proprietary data, how would one go about starting training a world model?
    • walrus01 41 minutes ago
      I don't know about the training, but in terms of the the 'a lot of data', probably one of the inputs would be something like the geospatial data that Niantic has collected from all of the world's Ingress and Pokemon Go players, correlated with other more basic mapping data and things like google street view type camera data.

      https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=pokemon+g...

    • modeless 56 minutes ago
      Step 1: raise a billion dollars. Step 2: send a billion dollars to someone with GPUs.
  • imnotr0b0t 1 hour ago
    I wonder where this will lead
    • autonomousErwin 49 minutes ago
      I'd bet world models will likely become the new "media" replacing tv, movies, music, video games etc.
      • jimbokun 3 minutes ago
        Yes, because consumers just LOVE to pay for anything associated with AI!
      • tintor 8 minutes ago
        Unlikely they will outcompete human artists and engineers using AIs to create those same types of media: tv, movies, music, games.
  • porphyra 1 hour ago
    World Labs is really cool. The 3D reconstruction from only a handful of frames is on another level.
  • avaer 1 hour ago
    Assuming this means AMD wants to jumpstart competition with NV on a model/simulation ecosystem (which NV has been doing for ~a decade). Probably has at least something to do with NV acquiring HF.

    I'm not sure how much things like Omniverse are used, but NV has put out some really interesting stuff in the space (like for example ARTY for a somewhat recent example).

    Overall it seems like a financial vote of confidence for "world models" (whatever that means, I still don't know). But it could also mean the death of the interesting things WL was doing with Marble + Atlas. It's hard to read PR.

    • binsquare 1 hour ago
      it was also likely difficult to do what WL was looking to do without significant amount of compute.

      Think it's a good match

      • wmf 38 minutes ago
        If the ROCm team can't get enough compute it doesn't bode well for World Labs.
      • lairv 44 minutes ago
        WL was probably mostly using NVIDIA compute though?
  • mathisfun123 44 minutes ago
    how to quickly make a couple million dollars these days: start a startup and then get acquired by AMD in a few years.
    • DANmode 5 minutes ago
      The AMD part looks too specific, but I’ll have to check the math.