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)
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.
Neolabs keep moving down the stack.
Neoclouds want to do neolab things and now chipmakers want to do neolab things
> 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.
I wonder where this will lead
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.
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?
The past couple of years have really driven home the fact that a company is worth what someone will pay for it
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).
> 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].
Given a lot of proprietary data, how would one go about starting training a world model?
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...
Step 1: raise a billion dollars. Step 2: send a billion dollars to someone with GPUs.
Step 3) Underpants ???
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