AMD acquires World Labs AI startup, upping the ante against Nvidia

AMD 收购 AI 初创公司 World Labs，加码挑战英伟达

Chipmaker AMD and world models company World Labs announced that AMD will acquire the AI company by the end of the year, pending regulatory approval. The transaction is valued at $8.2 billion. 芯片制造商 AMD 与世界模型公司 World Labs 宣布，在获得监管部门批准的前提下，AMD 将于今年年底前收购这家 AI 公司。该交易估值为 82 亿美元。

In 2024, computer vision scientist Fei-Fei Li founded World Labs with fellow researchers Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, and Ben Mildenhall, with $230 million in funding, some of which came from AMD. The company began working on new world models, which are AI models that aim to provide a useful, predictive simulation of the physical world. 2024 年，计算机视觉科学家李飞飞（Fei-Fei Li）与研究人员 Justin Johnson、Christoph Lassner 和 Ben Mildenhall 共同创立了 World Labs，并获得了 2.3 亿美元的融资，其中部分资金来自 AMD。该公司致力于开发新型“世界模型”，即旨在为物理世界提供实用且具有预测性的模拟 AI 模型。

Competing architectures exist (earlier this year, Ars interviewed World Labs co-founder Ben Mildenhall and others in the field about exactly that), but many involve training a model on vast amounts of video data. That was the case for Marble, World Labs’ first publicly usable tool. Marble can generate small 3D spaces using Gaussian splats. They can then be exported as 3D assets for use in film production, game development, and other applications. 目前存在多种竞争架构（今年早些时候，Ars 曾就此采访过 World Labs 联合创始人 Ben Mildenhall 及该领域的其他专家），但许多架构需要利用海量视频数据来训练模型。World Labs 首款公开发布的工具 Marble 就是如此。Marble 可以利用高斯溅射（Gaussian splats）技术生成小型 3D 空间，这些空间随后可导出为 3D 资产，用于电影制作、游戏开发及其他应用场景。

The company has since introduced additional models and tools with different emphasis or use cases, such as Atlas. One use case that has justified enormous investment in the space is generating synthetic data for training robots. That’s a field where Nvidia, AMD’s direct competitor, has a strong lead. 此后，该公司又推出了侧重点或用途各异的其他模型和工具，例如 Atlas。该领域之所以能吸引巨额投资，原因之一是能够生成用于训练机器人的合成数据。而这正是 AMD 的直接竞争对手英伟达占据显著领先地位的领域。

AMD has produced its own AI models before, including Micro-World, an open-source world model, but it has not produced a stack that competes with Nvidia’s Cosmos and related models and applications. This acquisition not only brings World Labs’ models under AMD’s roof, it also brings in some of the leading research talent working on these models. AMD 此前曾开发过自己的 AI 模型，包括开源世界模型 Micro-World，但尚未构建出能与英伟达的 Cosmos 及其相关模型和应用相抗衡的技术栈。此次收购不仅将 World Labs 的模型纳入了 AMD 麾下，还吸纳了在该领域处于领先地位的研究人才。

According to World Labs’ announcement of the deal, Fei-Fei Li will become Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist at AMD, while “Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall will work with Fei-Fei to continue leading the World Labs team as it joins AMD to form a world-leading frontier research organization.” 根据 World Labs 关于此次交易的公告，李飞飞将出任 AMD 执行副总裁兼首席科学家，而“Justin Johnson 和 Ben Mildenhall 将与李飞飞合作，继续领导 World Labs 团队，并入 AMD 后共同组建一个世界领先的前沿研究机构。”

While World Labs’ early public successes were in tools and models for content creation (Marble came up a lot at this year’s SIGGRAPH conference for computer graphics), AMD’s focus in its own acquisition announcement seems to be more on the robotics side. “As AI expands into reasoning, robotics, simulation and physical AI, the demands on compute infrastructure become more diverse,” it reads. “World Labs’ expertise in developing advanced models will give AMD deeper insight into how workloads are evolving and help shape its future technology roadmaps.” 虽然 World Labs 早期的公开成就主要集中在内容创作工具和模型上（Marble 在今年的 SIGGRAPH 计算机图形学大会上备受关注），但 AMD 在其收购公告中似乎更侧重于机器人领域。公告称：“随着 AI 向推理、机器人、模拟和物理 AI 领域扩展，对计算基础设施的需求变得更加多样化。World Labs 在开发先进模型方面的专业知识，将使 AMD 更深入地了解工作负载的演变趋势，并有助于塑造其未来的技术路线图。”

World Labs’ acquisition comes sooner than expected for such a young company, but AMD’s involvement shouldn’t be a surprise. The two companies had partnered before, and AMD needs this kind of expertise to compete in an AI chip landscape that Nvidia dominates. 对于这样一家年轻的公司来说，被收购的时间比预期要早，但 AMD 的介入并不令人意外。两家公司此前已有过合作，且 AMD 需要这种专业能力，以便在英伟达主导的 AI 芯片市场中展开竞争。