These things are all bets on the future -- and with the World Labs and Taalas acquisitions, in particular, the bet they're making is that conventional LLM development will plateau or become utterly commodified.
It's also a hedged bet against Nvidia's interest in fullstack robotics. AMD missed the datacenter train, but it's not too late to start building out an edge robotics hardware stack, maybe derived from CDNA.
I haven't heard about them, I was going to comment about how these reaserchers will get bitter lesson'd, but after looking at what they do, their "world models" are actually transformer models.
This means that the conversation has shifted to the point where we can assume that transforms hold emergent world models (already proven for tiny toy worlds). This is good, because it's probably true.
In any case, this looks awesome and I wish them all the best!
Dr Fei Fei Li's book The Worlds I See is a great read about both her life and the history of early AI and her role in it, which is major (Ilya was one of her phd students, along with the Alex of AlexNet) so if you don't already know the history of these systems, it's a great read. Very inspiring stuff. Great read and learned about it here so passing on the good word
Doing this on a throwaway to ask some awkward questions.
Way to go and all, and I suppose the investors got an exit but I still scratch my head on this one. We've seen the rise of World Labs from the beginning to this exit, and still the raw output is barely usable for any conceivable use case.
The raw output from these models is very similar or identical to what you can get to generating a splat from a camera that rotates using minimax or other frontier video models.
I work with clients in real world design contexts and the output from world labs was never usable due to all sorts of distortions and errors and stuff.
So again it's cool, but like what was all this hype about? This was usable in a very niche case if you're making video games with no care for spatial continuity and are okay with super heavy assets.
I am surely missing something as I just black box test these things for applicability in the real world, and I just never found any.
Tangent comment, it's so sad you had to create a throwaway here just to express this opinion.
People shouldn't have to be afraid to post what they think of tech topics here, as long as it is not an illegal expression of speech. i.e. one shouldn't have to use a throwaway to ask sensible and valid questions.
Yeah sorry guilty as charged -- it's hard because I've met these people IRL and yes I don't want to damage those relationships.
They're super nice, smart and capable folks. But, also as a practitioner in this space the gulf I see between stated capabilities and actual output is super big and I just don't get it.
I'm also worried I'm missing something obvious, like it's me that's the problem and that's embarrassing.
Congrats to Fei-fei on her newly acquired fortune, truly a rags-to-riches story.
One can really scam their way to the very top[1], but sometimes I empathize with the actor, they've been so marked by poverty that they'll do whatever it takes to escape it.
Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-28/amd-to-bu...
Worldlabs PR: https://www.worldlabs.ai/blog/amd-announcement
CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/28/amd-fei-fei-li-world-labs.ht...
Tweet: https://twitter.com/EdLudlow/status/2104664216393420843
What is AMD getting out of this?
Talent and ability to create next gen of multimodal models.
Mostly just 3d world models though, they're not the same as multimodal models.
They're building quite the stack in experimental and ambitious AI model development.
For e.g., they recently acquired Taalas. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49201970
These things are all bets on the future -- and with the World Labs and Taalas acquisitions, in particular, the bet they're making is that conventional LLM development will plateau or become utterly commodified.
It's also a hedged bet against Nvidia's interest in fullstack robotics. AMD missed the datacenter train, but it's not too late to start building out an edge robotics hardware stack, maybe derived from CDNA.
I haven't heard about them, I was going to comment about how these reaserchers will get bitter lesson'd, but after looking at what they do, their "world models" are actually transformer models.
This means that the conversation has shifted to the point where we can assume that transforms hold emergent world models (already proven for tiny toy worlds). This is good, because it's probably true.
In any case, this looks awesome and I wish them all the best!
Dr Fei Fei Li's book The Worlds I See is a great read about both her life and the history of early AI and her role in it, which is major (Ilya was one of her phd students, along with the Alex of AlexNet) so if you don't already know the history of these systems, it's a great read. Very inspiring stuff. Great read and learned about it here so passing on the good word
Doing this on a throwaway to ask some awkward questions.
Way to go and all, and I suppose the investors got an exit but I still scratch my head on this one. We've seen the rise of World Labs from the beginning to this exit, and still the raw output is barely usable for any conceivable use case.
The raw output from these models is very similar or identical to what you can get to generating a splat from a camera that rotates using minimax or other frontier video models.
I work with clients in real world design contexts and the output from world labs was never usable due to all sorts of distortions and errors and stuff.
So again it's cool, but like what was all this hype about? This was usable in a very niche case if you're making video games with no care for spatial continuity and are okay with super heavy assets.
I am surely missing something as I just black box test these things for applicability in the real world, and I just never found any.
Tangent comment, it's so sad you had to create a throwaway here just to express this opinion.
People shouldn't have to be afraid to post what they think of tech topics here, as long as it is not an illegal expression of speech. i.e. one shouldn't have to use a throwaway to ask sensible and valid questions.
Yeah sorry guilty as charged -- it's hard because I've met these people IRL and yes I don't want to damage those relationships.
They're super nice, smart and capable folks. But, also as a practitioner in this space the gulf I see between stated capabilities and actual output is super big and I just don't get it.
I'm also worried I'm missing something obvious, like it's me that's the problem and that's embarrassing.
So at least I'll share that anonymously. :/
Fastest pump and dump ever.
Congrats to Fei-fei on her newly acquired fortune, truly a rags-to-riches story.
One can really scam their way to the very top[1], but sometimes I empathize with the actor, they've been so marked by poverty that they'll do whatever it takes to escape it.
1: Some might argue this is the only way.
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.