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Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49883744
I wonder where this will lead
I'd bet world models will likely become the new "media" replacing tv, movies, music, video games etc.
Unlikely they will outcompete human artists and engineers using AIs to create those same types of media: tv, movies, music, games.
Yes, because consumers just LOVE to pay for anything associated with AI!
It'll be very interesting to see how the dust settles after this window of AI IPOs and acquisitions closes.
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.
it was also likely difficult to do what WL was looking to do without significant amount of compute.
Think it's a good match
WL was probably mostly using NVIDIA compute though?
If the ROCm team can't get enough compute it doesn't bode well for World Labs.
Is a 2-year-old company worth 8 billion USD?
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).
You're right. Her bio writes like an OP self-insert character's [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fei-Fei_Li
The past couple of years have really driven home the fact that a company is worth what someone will pay for it
just like NFTs :)
And that "Attention is all you need" applies to financial markets as well.
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"
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.
Could be if they are pre-revenue.
They're a potential pure play
Given a lot of proprietary data, how would one go about starting training a world model?
Step 1: raise a billion dollars. Step 2: send a billion dollars to someone with GPUs.
Funnily enough now you can get the billion dollars from NVIDIA themselves.
But only if you promise to spend the billion dollars on something NVIDIA is selling
or https://colo.to/nvidia-stock-narrative.html
Step 3) Underpants ???
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...
Neolabs keep moving down the stack.
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.
World Labs is really cool. The 3D reconstruction from only a handful of frames is on another level.
how to quickly make a couple million dollars these days: start a startup and then get acquired by AMD in a few years.
The AMD part looks too specific, but I’ll have to check the math.
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)
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.
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!
Tge point though, is the TAM might already be saturated.
Even if you buy singularity the people who needand afford it is dwindling.
This also assumes societal cohesion isnt destroyed by sed people.
I think it's true in the general case that people who want to create stuff (eg games) will create stuff and people who don't won't.
its hard bc everyone here is some form of builder. but there are people out there who just have almost no desire to create.
and even if we lower the bar for creating to "hey llm make me a new video game to play tonight" that will still come with all the baggage of creation and turn folks off.
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.
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.
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.
It's called Hyperloom.
And then what?
Then all software moats become shallow
Fortunately for Nvidia, they sell hardware and give away software.
Yes, but specifically they sell hardware at absurd margins, and lock people in via their software ecosystem.
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.
You can already do this with oh my pi or oh my openagent
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.
My guess is their tech can be used for spatial reasoning training environments, which gives a value beyond just output of a 3D scene.
~2.5 years roughly and an $8.2 billion exit. Absolutely amazing honestly.