AMD buys Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2B; Instinct hits $10B

AMD is buying World Labs for about $8.2B, all stock. Fei-Fei Li becomes EVP and Chief Scientist, reporting straight to CEO Lisa Su. World Labs builds spatial-intelligence models that generate and simulate interactive 3D worlds, and it also makes tech for robotic learning. AMD says that insight will shape its chip roadmaps for reasoning, robotics and physical AI. It's AMD's second-biggest deal ever, behind the ~$50B Xilinx purchase in 2022. Closing is expected by the end of 2026.

Instinct, Noah Shinn's personal AI agent, raised a $1B Series C at a $10B valuation from Sequoia, Benchmark and Coatue. That is four times the $2.5B valuation from its August round, roughly a month earlier. The product handles calls, bookings and everyday tasks. It is still in early access, with no user numbers disclosed.

Yann LeCun called Anthropic's Dario Amodei "completely deluded" over his AI-extinction warnings. He put the recent rogue-agent incidents down to sandboxes that were "leaky and horribly designed", not to runaway AI. He said he has "zero concerns" about extinction and called the doom messaging "the worst marketing campaign you can possibly imagine."

Why it matters: chipmakers are buying their way into physical AI, investors are paying frontier prices for unproven agents, and the safety debate is now about sandbox engineering.