World Labs Is Joining AMD

105 points by mfiguiere an hour ago on hackernews | 29 comments

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49883744

I wonder where this will lead

: autonomousErwin | 42 minutes ago
I'd bet world models will likely become the new "media" replacing tv, movies, music, video games etc.

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 | 54 minutes 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

: lairv | 37 minutes ago
WL was probably mostly using NVIDIA compute though?
: wmf | 31 minutes ago
If the ROCm team can't get enough compute it doesn't bode well for World Labs.

AbuAssar | an hour ago

Is a 2-year-old company worth 8 billion USD?

avaer | an hour 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).

: JumpCrisscross | 33 minutes ago
> A name like Fei-Fei Li is probably worth a chunk of that
You're right. Her bio writes like an OP self-insert character's [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fei-Fei_Li

kylecazar | 33 minutes ago

The past couple of years have really driven home the fact that a company is worth what someone will pay for it

: singhkays | 12 minutes ago
just like NFTs :)

Glemmlko | 12 minutes 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"

ianm218 | 9 minutes 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.

tintor | 3 minutes ago

Could be if they are pre-revenue.

esalman | 57 minutes ago

Given a lot of proprietary data, how would one go about starting training a world model?

modeless | 49 minutes ago

Step 1: raise a billion dollars. Step 2: send a billion dollars to someone with GPUs.

porphyra | 43 minutes ago

Funnily enough now you can get the billion dollars from NVIDIA themselves.

: drusepth | 41 minutes ago
But only if you promise to spend the billion dollars on something NVIDIA is selling

walrus01 | 32 minutes ago

Step 3) Underpants ???

walrus01 | 34 minutes 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...

calebhwin | 57 minutes ago

Neolabs keep moving down the stack.

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

: JumpCrisscross | 31 minutes 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.

porphyra | 54 minutes ago

World Labs is really cool. The 3D reconstruction from only a handful of frames is on another level.

mathisfun123 | 37 minutes ago

how to quickly make a couple million dollars these days: start a startup and then get acquired by AMD in a few years.

LarsDu88 | 15 minutes 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)

: cyanydeez | 11 minutes 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.
: echelon | 10 minutes 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.
: ahartmetz | 9 minutes 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.