Chipmaker AMD and world models company World Labs announced that AMD will acquire the AI company by the end of the year, pending regulatory approval. The transaction is valued at $8.2 billion.

In 2024, computer vision scientist Fei-Fei Li founded World Labs with fellow researchers Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, and Ben Mildenhall, with $230 million in funding, some of which came from AMD.

The company began working on new world models, which are AI models that aim to provide a useful, predictive simulation of the physical world. Competing architectures exist (earlier this year, Ars interviewed World Labs co-founder Ben Mildenhall and others in the field about exactly that), but many involve training a model on vast amounts of video data.

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Today, the Firefox 157 update will roll out a redesign of the web browser across desktop and mobile platforms. The team that made it hopes it will help expand the browser's audience beyond privacy-conscious techies and open-web or open source advocates to a broader audience who might simply pick the browser because they prefer its user experience over competitors like Chrome, Edge, and Safari.

In advance of the redesign's launch, I spent half an hour chatting with Mozilla's head of Firefox, Ajit Varma, about Firefox's current market position and product strategy, and what barriers or opportunities there are for gaining ground in a Chromium-dominated landscape.

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As Apple's Tim Cook era draws to a close, we're seeing more experimentation with the iPhone's design than we've seen in a long time, but you wouldn't know it from the iPhone 18 Pro. This absurdly fast, full-featured handset might be eclipsed by the hype around the iPhone Duo this year, but it's still just as good as its immediate predecessor.

Of course, not too much has changed since the iPhone 17 Pro. There's the new variable aperture and other camera controls for those who want to get granular with their mobile photography, a welcome addition given the iPhone's reputation for inflexibly opinionated computational photography.

Beyond that, though, all the most important changes are under the hood: a new chip, better battery life, and much-improved thermals that both give the phone better sustained performance and make it cooler to the touch in many situations.

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