World Labs Is Joining AMD

(worldlabs.ai)

138 points | by mfiguiere 2 hours ago

13 comments

  • LarsDu88 1 hour 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 1 hour 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 1 hour 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.
        • wmf 53 minutes ago
          It's called Hyperloom.
        • fragmede 50 minutes ago
          And then what?
          • nwah1 47 minutes ago
            Then all software moats become shallow
            • fragmede 46 minutes ago
              Fortunately for Nvidia, they sell hardware and give away software.
              • tybit 29 minutes ago
                Yes, but specifically they sell hardware at absurd margins, and lock people in via their software ecosystem.
                • fragmede 27 minutes ago
                  Keep going... extrapolate out further. There's a conclusion you beley will be true, but haven't fully thought through why that conclusion must be true if CUDA is no longer the moat it once was.
    • echelon 1 hour 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 1 hour 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.

      • LarsDu88 31 minutes ago
        I used to think that, but I've started to come around to the fact that better AI comes with progressive unlocks that create new use cases. I suspect in 18 months, one of the primary consumers of tokens will be people using LLMs for one-shotting increasingly complicated games rather than just white collar work.

        Then there's the matter of engineering and synthesizing consumer objects completely personalized for users!

  • calebhwin 2 hours ago
    Neolabs keep moving down the stack.

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

    • JumpCrisscross 1 hour 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.

  • Mr_P 1 hour 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.

    • jtfrench 49 minutes ago
      My guess is their tech can be used for spatial reasoning training environments, which gives a value beyond just output of a 3D scene.
  • AbuAssar 2 hours ago
    Is a 2-year-old company worth 8 billion USD?
    • kylecazar 1 hour ago
      The past couple of years have really driven home the fact that a company is worth what someone will pay for it
      • jtfrench 48 minutes ago
        And that "Attention is all you need" applies to financial markets as well.
      • singhkays 1 hour ago
        just like NFTs :)
    • ianm218 1 hour 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 1 hour 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 1 hour ago
      Could be if they are pre-revenue.
    • avaer 2 hours 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 2 hours ago
  • esalman 2 hours ago
    Given a lot of proprietary data, how would one go about starting training a world model?
    • modeless 1 hour ago
      Step 1: raise a billion dollars. Step 2: send a billion dollars to someone with GPUs.
    • walrus01 1 hour 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...

  • imnotr0b0t 2 hours ago
    I wonder where this will lead
    • autonomousErwin 1 hour ago
      I'd bet world models will likely become the new "media" replacing tv, movies, music, video games etc.
      • tintor 1 hour ago
        Unlikely they will outcompete human artists and engineers using AIs to create those same types of media: tv, movies, music, games.
      • jimbokun 1 hour ago
        Yes, because consumers just LOVE to pay for anything associated with AI!
        • jtfrench 45 minutes ago
          It'll be very interesting to see how the dust settles after this window of AI IPOs and acquisitions closes.
  • porphyra 1 hour ago
    World Labs is really cool. The 3D reconstruction from only a handful of frames is on another level.
  • avaer 2 hours 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 1 hour ago
        If the ROCm team can't get enough compute it doesn't bode well for World Labs.
      • lairv 1 hour ago
        WL was probably mostly using NVIDIA compute though?
  • mathisfun123 1 hour 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 1 hour ago
      The AMD part looks too specific, but I’ll have to check the math.