World Labs to join AMD; Fei-Fei Li becomes Chief Scientist

World Labs Is Joining AMD

World Labs signed a definitive agreement to join AMD. Fei-Fei Li will become AMD's EVP and Chief Scientist, reporting to CEO Lisa Su. Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall will keep leading the team as it forms a new frontier research org inside AMD. The two companies started a technical partnership last year on model training and inference optimization on AMD GPUs. The goal is an end-to-end open AI ecosystem spanning hardware, software, and open models. The deal is expected to close by end of 2026, pending regulatory approvals.

Why it matters: Fei-Fei Li's startup joining AMD with her as Chief Scientist is one of the year's biggest personnel + strategy mergers. All three HKR axes hit: the personnel pairing creates suspense, the technical partnership has concrete timeline and goals, and the academia-to-industry arc r...