To Seek a Newer World

Key ideas

Announcing World Labs joining AMD, Li explains why she started a company in 2024 and why she now sees AMD as the right path for its mission.

1. 1

   Choose the vehicle that fits the moment

   Li writes that when generative AI took off and frontier research moved from academia to industry, she judged a startup offered the deepest and broadest potential for impact. She presents joining AMD as the same kind of judgment, reached at a later moment. In her telling the mission stays fixed while the structure around it changes.

2. 2

   Assemble a team the problem demands

   Li says the physical-world problem needed wide-ranging skills, including data, computer vision, large model training, systems and computer graphics. She names Ben Mildenhall and Justin Johnson as co-founders and says the founding team includes experts across these areas. She describes the recently released Atlas model as predicting new camera views the way language models predict the next token, and later calls the team's breakthroughs tangible proof of what is possible.

3. 3

   Why World Labs needed the hardware

   Li writes that acting on World Labs' results requires scaling, wider reach and getting closer to hardware. She argues AI without a focused hardware effort is held back in efficiency and scale, and for her purposes stays confined to the digital world. That need is the reason she gives for joining AMD.

4. 4

   A partnership that grew into the deal

   Li traces the relationship back to the company's earliest days, when AMD's CEO Lisa Su was an early investor. She says a deep technical partnership began last year with model training and inference optimization on AMD GPUs. She writes that the teams came to see the combination as a natural fit while working together.

5. 5

   What Li says continues after the deal

   Li spells out what she says will carry over: the mission, a frontier research organization she wants to be durable for decades, and a commitment to work openly and provide open models. She also states her own new role, working directly with Su. These are stated commitments; the post gives no terms or structure for them.

In Fei-Fei’s words

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