Podcast Episode

AMD will acquire Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs for $8.2 billion; Physical AI chip developer SiMa AI hits $1.45B valuation

TechCrunch Startup News

Sep 29, 20266 min

Who’s talking

2 speakers
Speaker 16 min · 92%
Speaker 229 sec · 8%

1Transcript2 turns · 6 min

Speaker 10:02

This is Tech Crunch. This episode is brought to you by Framer. Listen, your wardrobe is not the only thing that should be changing with the season. Now is the perfect time to start thinking about updating and refreshing your website with new content. And Framer makes that easy to do. Even easier than trying to plan out your next outfit. Framer has everything you need to build and run a website, a canvas tool for design, hosting, a built-in CMS, and AI agents that work alongside you to help bring your vision to the screen. And it's all in one place, so you can stop skipping around to a hundred different apps. You can update your site and have it go live in a few minutes, or build a new one from scratch. Now, I love Framer's powerful SEO tools that have really helped me zero in on my target audience. I can track my traffic through their analytics, and I can optimize my site so that it works across any device. Plus, there's enterprise-grade security to protect all my info. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist, or get started building for free today at framer.com slash tcstartups for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com slash tcstartups for 30% off. framer.com slash tcstartups. Rules and restrictions may apply. AMD is acquiring WorldLabs, one of the leading developers of deep learning models intended to understand physical reality. It's an $8.2 billion deal, and it was announced on Monday. WorldLabs justified the deal in a statement saying that AI development required close collaboration across model research, systems, and compute. AMD, in turn, says that understanding frontier workloads like those created at WorldLabs will shape its chip-making roadmap. The acquisition will see WorldLabs founder Fei-Fei Li join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist. AMD and World Labs formed an inference optimization and training partnership last year, and ties have remained close. Notably, Li was a guest at AMD's CES presentation earlier this year. Li, a Stanford computer science professor, is considered a pioneer in AI. particularly computer vision, for her work building the ImageNet database and the AI competitions it inspired. Back in 2024, Lee founded WorldLabs to develop deep learning models with a more robust understanding of the physical world, arguing that true general intelligence required a grounding in physics and the ability to understand and reason about data beyond text. In a post announcing the deal, Lee described the partnership as the result of a desire to scale World Lab's technical breakthroughs beyond the lab. She said, Now that we have tangible proof of the possibilities, we want to do everything we can to accelerate the future. To do this requires scaling our efforts, widening our reach, and getting closer to the hardware. World model remains a loosely defined term, encompassing everything from language models trained to understand visual inputs to models capable of generating and sustaining a high-fidelity simulation of reality. World Lab's first product, Marble, is pitched for creating entertainment experiences, but also for the ability to create simulated environments for

2Episode notes

The acquisition will see World Labs founder Fei-Fei Li join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist.

Also, SiMa.AI, the edge computing startup, raised a $150 million Series C led by Fidelity and Amplify.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Showing a preview — retrieve the full transcript via the Exa API.

Powered by the Exa API

See something wrong or missing on this page?