AMD will acquire Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs for $8.2 billion

World Labs, one of the leading developers of deep learning models intended to understand physical reality, has been acquired in a $8.2 billion deal, the two companies said today.

World Labs justified the deal in a statement saying that AI development required “close collaboration across model reseach, systems and compute.” AMD, in turn, says that understanding frontier workloads like those created at World Labs will shape its chip-making roadmap.

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