Renowned AI researcher Li Fei-Fei is to become chief scientist and an executive vice-president at AMD after the chipmaker said it would buy Li’s start-up World Labs for $8.2 billion (£6.2bn) in stock.

Li, a Stanford professor who has worked at Google, founded World Labs only two years ago to spearhead research into AI that interacts with the physical world.

The company’s models help train AI-powered agents or physical devices to interact with physical environments.

World Labs co-founders Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, Ben Mildenhall and Li Fei-Fei.

“Intelligent agents, whether it’s robots or vehicles or even tools, can learn inside very rich physics-aware digital worlds before they even need to be deployed into the real one, making them much safer,” Li said at a presentation earlier this year.

At the presentation, Li and AMD chief executive Lisa Su showed a World Labs model called Marble creating a three-dimensional environment based on several images.

In a statement, Li said World Labs would “continue building a world leading frontier research organisation”.

Chip rivalry

AMD, which makes desktop and server processors, is also one of the main rivals challenging Nvidia in the market for the GPUs used to accelerate AI workloads.

The company is a previous investor in World Labs, as is Nvidia.

Its purchase of World Labs comes on the heels of Nvidia’s September agreement to purchase AI technology platform Hugging Face for $12.9bn.