CEOInterviews.AIAMD CEO Lisa Su Live on TBPN

H

Host37:42

Do you have a whole brand book yet?

A

AJ37:44

Uh, we're going with the vibes and the aura, man. It's like.

H

Host37:48

I like it. As I've learned, just the vibes, generally the vibes like are in the space of Frontier, which you guys have been an extraordinary voice on. Stuff changes every day.

A

AJ38:06

Yeah. And so nobody's got any time to look at the first principles, the details, what's actually happening, what's like which model's coming out, what's the difference between Fable 5 and like CEX, blah blah blah, like.

H

Host38:17

And so it's all aura-based decision-making right now.

A

AJ38:20

Because the brain just needs some easy heuristic to.

H

Host38:23

I'm surprised we haven't seen a chief aura officer.

A

AJ38:27

That's the next like chief brand officer. But when somebody does that, sell everything. So, it's probably too much once there's a new.

H

Host38:35

But you make a good point which is that if you have motion, doesn't matter what your site looks like or what your logo looks like. People just like attach their own feel to whatever you're putting out.

A

AJ38:53

Motion is underrated. There should be an AI company research in motion. That would be good.

H

Host38:58

Wasn't that Blackberry?

A

AJ38:59

Yeah, anyway. I'm not that. So, but I want to answer your question which is what is the brand? The brand is what you know you stand for and we stand for output maxing.

H

Host39:08

Okay.

A

AJ39:08

I love it.

Right. The.

H

Host39:10

There's just too much like what are we living through right now? We're living through the AI scaling era.

A

AJ39:15

Yeah.

Bitter lesson holds.

H

Host39:17

That scale scale scale.

A

AJ39:18

Y but the brain is naturally anchored to large numbers.

H

Host39:23

Yeah. But nobody if you actually deconstruct what's going on in this space, there's so much wastage because nobody's doing the output maxing efficiency right, which is what's the output divided by the unit of input.

A

AJ39:36

Yeah.

And if you start measuring businesses or model capabilities or whatever through efficiency, the story is completely different than what just the headlines say.

H

Host39:45

Yeah.

A

AJ39:46

Right.

A lot of people were token maxing and I think we will look back on that era as really valuable exploration, actually totally worth it. But I like output maxing as the correct coinage as opposed to token maxing. I was trying to say token minmaxing, token optimization. It's way better output maxing. I love it.

H

Host40:04

It's like what are we all here for? It's to try to grow GDP. Not at all expenses. It's to grow GDP in the compute-optimal way. Yeah.

A

AJ40:11

Right. You cannot beat China at pure scaling.

It's just not going to happen. Industrial-scale coordination where they go, 'You know what? Ban the H100s, H200s. All of you use Huawei and get together and figure out how to scale with even if we don't have the leading edge chips put out Kim K3. I don't care, I'm Xi Jinping. I just want for us to be at the frontier and make 100 new nuclear plants whatever. Build, build, build, baby. Build scale whatever is required. You guys the permitting, who needs permitting? They will just clear all the bottlenecks at a scale we don't understand. They will bring at least 100 gigawatts of new energy capacity online in the next decade without even blinking.

H

Host40:54

Yeah.

A

AJ40:54

Yeah.

Meanwhile, they were already... they weren't even AI pills and they were planning on doing it anyway. They're like, 'Yeah.'

H

Host41:00

Yeah.

A

AJ41:00

Uh, so what do we have to do? We have to be smarter. We have to do output maxing. We've got to be more efficient. Only 15% of every single tenant data center today in the United States is being utilized.

H

Host41:11

Net flops utilization?

A

AJ41:13

Oh.

Is less than 20% in the United States.

H

Host41:17

It is crazy. Is that just downtime from chips not being used at the right time, like misconfigurations, like the water supply's out or something? What's going on?

A

AJ41:26

Basically, for every dollar of long-term lease that an AI lab takes today, you lose about 30-40% flops in just bad scheduling. The nodes are just straight up not allocated. And then it's there, but it's just not getting work at the right time.

H

Host41:38

Correct.

A

AJ41:39

Then within the chip, you only have like 15% of the chip being utilized. That's called MFU, model flop utilization, because the chip is waiting around for some other process to complete: storage, memory, networking, or some other chip to hand it off. So as a result, if you compound those two things, of every dollar, only 15% of flops are actually being utilized.

H

Host41:56

That 85% is a national security crisis. Because that's what's keeping us from staying at the frontier.

A

AJ42:02

Yeah.

That's why we all keep complaining about, 'Oh, communicate 3 came out.' Sure, you could talk about distillation. Distillation is definitely happening. However, everybody who feels compute-pinched in the United States should be asking, 'Am I doing both? Am I getting more capabilities? Am I building up more supply? And thank God Lisa is on it. But also, are we utilizing the existing capacity to get the maximum output possible?' And both those things are what's going to keep us at the frontier. Yeah. Does that make sense?

H

Host42:29

Yeah.

Yeah. It's sort of a natural cycle. Any company that has grown really quickly, or any industry that's grown really quickly, there's just all this waste and misutilized resources. But the key, and I think what you're pushing for, is even if you have this exponential growth, you can still try to be more efficient now so that we don't give up the advantages that we do have.

A

AJ42:53

I don't think we have a choice because the supply chain is backed up for like two years. So we at AMP Grid are procuring energy and new capacity for 2030. And there's not enough sites. We're going to need nuclear.

H

Host43:08

Wow.

Are you spending time in nuclear companies?

A

AJ43:10

Yes, actually there's Seth right over there. Hi, Seth.

H

Host43:12

Hi, Seth. How you doing?

A

AJ43:14

Seth is a founder of a company called Mavera that we've just invested in. I don't think... He was pop on the show. Pop on the show after.

H

Host43:22

Yeah. After he gets off. Well, yeah. We'll talk to you.

A

AJ43:25

Go over there. Talk to me. A good time.

H

Host43:26

Yeah.

A

AJ43:26

Yeah. Seth was at the DOE and was one of the people responsible for a bunch of permitting that just finally got approved for new nuclear projects in the United States. Cool.

H

Host43:39

And he's... Thank you for your service, sir. Okay, we'll give you a proper mic in a couple minutes. We've got one more question. We... I know you.

Yeah. So walk us through the shape of your business right now. You have the fund, you're making new investments. You've got a big allocation in Anthropic ground to date, but otherwise what is the shape of the business you're building out? To me it's like two different businesses that are very intertwined, but how are you spending your time?

A

AJ44:10

Yeah. So we've got AMP Foundry, which is our venture capital firm and capital business. We raise venture capital funds...

H

Host44:16

You don't make a single chip there.

A

AJ44:18

We do not make any chips yet. Not yet. Who knows? I wouldn't put it past you. Lisa's a great partner. On the but our infrastructure arm, which we're actually spinning out pretty soon as an independent entity.

H

Host44:34

Oh, interesting.

A

AJ44:35

And we're not ready to announce the name yet, but you guys are going to love it.

H

Host44:39

So, that's for a follow up. It is building out about 2 GW of capacity in the United States.

A

AJ44:43

Okay.

And we're not making our own chips yet, but we're building out new sites.

H

Host44:50

Yeah. You're marshalling the capital, getting the right partners in place so everything can come together and the compute can come online.

A

AJ44:57

Yes.

H

Host44:57

Uh, speaking of two gigawatts, what can you tell us about this Anthropic AMD deal? I think it's 2 gigawatts, $5 billion investment.

A

AJ45:05

Oh, six gigawatts. Is that what it is?

H

Host45:07

But I'm interested in first, it just seems like another positive sign for the industry for Anthropic and AMD. And it feels like we're also... I haven't checked all the reactions, but it feels like are we post-circular deal FUD? This seems like a very logical deal. Everyone's seen the ARR charts. Everything's growing. Businesses are using the tools. It's a full ecosystem. The economy is growing and so this type of partnership makes sense. But what do you tell to an earlier stage founder if they're trying to do a strategic deal?

A

AJ45:42

Well, well past the circular part. I mean these were all concerns maybe two years ago, right? I agree. And so if you look at the value creation when you have Anthropic go from zero literally when we started the business five years ago to well north of 40 billion in run rate, right? And most of that revenue is coming from everyday customers using cloud to code. That's not circular, that's just new value creation. Now the question is how do you keep a healthy independent ecosystem of all kinds of frontier capabilities churning?

H

Host46:16

Sure.

A

AJ46:17

And the problem is that private credit markets do not see startups as investment grade counterparties. So when they're trying to procure compute capacity three, four years out, they just can't get those contracts, they're not financable. And so what we need in the United States is a financing program that says, 'Okay, we're going to be able to turn startups...' I mean Anthropic was a startup not too long ago that was not considered investment grade. At this stage, they actually likely are still not investment grade. Neither is OpenAI, but they're starting to become more underwritable by the financial markets, right? And I think what we've got to do in the United States is a little bit of innovation to go, 'How do you get the ecosystem to understand the quality of these startups?' They're the engine of innovation. Anthropic is 5,000-ish people today. Google is 60,000 people. Accenture is 75,000. And neither Accenture nor Google are responsible for frontier model innovation today. Google still hasn't put out an Anthropic-grade coding model. And they're trying their best. But it's a focus thing. Focused teams get more done.

H

Host47:40

Speaking of that, are large founding teams underrated?

A

AJ47:46

Are large founding teams underrated? Because there's a world where Anthropic is the exception to the rule, it's working for them. Crazy. I mean, young company but huge company. All the founders still there. And is another great example. Five strong team. There was a while where Silicon Valley wisdom was like two maybe three, right?

H

Host48:04

Right.

A

AJ48:04

Most startup advice is designed for the media, fun for podcast. But the outlier businesses have large founding teams. They have family founding teams like the Stripe brothers. The conventional wisdom is don't start a business. Yeah, and Dario and Danielle are brother and sister. The Collins are brother and sister. Black Forest Labs is 12 co-founders, all researchers.

H

Host48:35

I had no idea.

A

AJ48:36

Yeah. So I think outliers do their own thing. And that's the point. Whatever it takes to compete at the frontier, and as long as you're super aligned and tight, I think that's what matters.

H

Host48:50

Okay.

Let's say you're talking to somebody who is now willing to admit that this AI thing is real. They see the revenue ramps. Let's say they're using various models. They're like this is very capable, but they're saying okay, a lot of the revenue is tied to coding right now. These tokens are deflationary over time. What is the next leg up in consumption? Where is it going to come from? Because finance is an interesting category but I don't see 200 billion of financial modeling spend on tokens. So where are you predicting or thinking about these next legs up after coding?

A

AJ49:47

So the gift that keeps giving still is reinforcement learning. It's just working as a technology. It's so simple. It's like training a dog. 'Hey, good dog, fetch. You did it right. Here's a treat.' And reward modeling used to be this bespoke craft thing two years ago. Now we're getting to the stage of industrial grade repeatable reinforcement learning as a service. So taking models and doing post-training where you have the weights and doing post-training on data that you care about on some small set of samples that are high quality where the reward is very clear and you're doing RL gets you your own jagged frontier very fast. You know, capabilities have a jagged frontier. Coding is clearly one area because of formal verification with unit tests. The progress has been super fast. Verification is something people still haven't truly internalized how generalizable this concept of the context feedback loop with verification built in is. And the algorithm is so simple, RL just works. Wherever you can do formal verification and RL, you're going to see crazy capabilities. One example is Periodic Labs, one of our portfolio companies. They're trying to discover room temperature superconductor. The pace of progress there has been extraordinary in the last six months. They've got a 40,000 square foot facility in Menlo Park where you have AI models predicting new materials, new candidates, and then robots synthesize the material and test with an X-ray diffraction machine. Does the material have the superconducting properties that the model said it would? And because that's verification from reality, from nature, from physics, the feedback signal is very clear. Then you take that signal and pipe it back into RL as many times as you need, and the capabilities ladder is extraordinary.

H

Host51:48

I want to go way deeper with you on science and what's next in AI. We've got to let you get to your panel, but thank you so much for coming on and hanging out. Always a pleasure.

A

AJ51:56

I hear I'm just the opening act for Lisa. So she's next. Have fun.

H

Host52:00

Yeah. And thank you for the introduction. We'll bring in your portfolio founder CEO. First, I'm going to tell you about Public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. They have stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service.

Welcome to the show. Introduce yourself.

How much do you bench?

S

Seth Cohen52:17

Uh, this morning 335. There we go.

H

Host52:20

Amazing. Can you lift this microphone up to your mouth? Thank you. And move it over a little bit. There we go. The other way like this. Loud room. Anyway, loud and clear. Give us an introduction. Yourself and the company.

S

Seth Cohen52:33

Hey guys. My name is Seth Cohen. I am one of the co-founders of Ma Inc. We are an AI infrastructure company and we're looking to tackle some of the biggest problems in the space. We're thrilled to be working with an... Yeah. Before this I was chief counsel of nuclear policy at the Department of Energy. Depending on who you ask, either a senior advisor or the conservator of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and an advisor at NASA. I was the DOGE operative, one of two responsible for implementing the president's nuclear executive orders across the government.

H

Host53:08

Very cool. Yeah, we were covering before that because that doesn't seem like the first job.

S

Seth Cohen53:13

Supreme Court and appellate litigation at a firm called Kirkland.

H

Host53:16

Oh, cool. Heard of that. Yeah.

So the hat says nuclear. You introduced the company as AI infrastructure. Is that because AI is the hot trend and nuclear is just a byproduct, or are you a pure nuclear company? Walk me through where the Venn diagram overlaps between AI infrastructure broadly, what you'll do and what you don't do, and nuclear, what you do and don't do.

S

Seth Cohen53:38

Yeah. So one of the things that my DOGE team leader who is now my co-founder Adam Blake, one of the things we first honed in on with nuclear were a set of bottlenecks that we thought were going to prevent anything we did from actually taking effect. We needed to solve a couple of other things. One of them was narrative. Nuclear is this incredible technology that has so much potential for the world, yet for 60 years it's faced this strange opposition, including around nuclear waste. By the way, if we can, I'd really like to talk about nuclear waste. It's my favorite thing in the world.

H

Host54:18

We love talking about nuclear waste. So you're in the right place.

S

Seth Cohen54:21

It's good to be among friends. So what we did with nuclear waste was actually shift the narrative. We went from Yucca Mountain being the only place where you could put high-level waste, completely off limits, to where we are now. 27 governors applied for this program that Adam and I started called the Nuclear Life Cycle Innovation Campus. I can't tell you the exact number, but it fits on two hands, the number of governors currently fighting to host the full backend fuel cycle.

H

Host54:53

Would that be one additional nuclear waste storage plant, to be one of three? And these are going to be cities, by the way, that if everything goes according to plan, will be competitive with major metropolitan areas because we're going to re-industrialize.

S

Seth Cohen55:08

Yeah. Yeah.

H

Host55:10

I feel like you're just talking about a hole in the ground. I need like two guys to protect it. What else is going on around a nuclear waste protection site?

S

Seth Cohen55:18

Well, to take a step back... Is it too late to offer up my backyard?

H

Host55:27

The ultimate NIMBY?

S

Seth Cohen55:27

No, I think first off, when we talk about nuclear waste, we have this strange idea and it's probably The Simpsons' fault.

H

Host55:36

Oh, yeah. Glowing.

S

Seth Cohen55:39

Yeah. I have seen the blue glow of a spent fuel rod, which is actually very cool, but there's no green goo. Almost all waste in the United States is medical stuff. It's like gloves because some person went behind a wall and pressed an X-ray button.

H

Host55:54

Oh, interesting. I didn't realize that falls in there. You think of it as the pellets, but it's really anything that touches that. There needs to be a whole processing facility for that. That makes sense.

S

Seth Cohen56:03

Yeah, that's most. But the second is commercial spent fuel. And just to be clear, it is fuel, but it's not spent by any means. About 97% of the potential energy remains in a fuel rod after it's done and has to be taken out of a reactor.

H

Host56:19

Why take it out if 90% of the rod's potential is still there?

S

Seth Cohen56:26

There are two main isotopes. One of which is getting split and used up. As that potential goes down, the ability to sustain a fission reaction goes down. Then you accumulate byproduct material, everything from plutonium to some really interesting stuff. Natural uranium is around 0.9% of this really good isotope. Most commercial fuel is 3.5 to 5%. When you're done with a rod, it's around 0.7%. We have 100,000 tons of this stuff from the lifetime of the commercial fleet, which fits in one football field. That is 60 years of energy, but it should be repurposed. There is four times more energy sitting on those pads outside our reactors than Saudi Arabia has in its proven oil reserves.

H

Host57:25

That's actually crazy. But that's not where the money is.

Where is the money? Where are you spending your time? How much time is in DC lobbying, leveraging the old stuff?

S

Seth Cohen57:33

Close the loop here. There's all this latent energy potential. I imagine you're doing something with it.

Well, we got this program into motion and I wanted to talk about it because I'm so excited about what's going on here. I think we're on the cusp of a real energy revolution in the United States. To understand why we're shifting, you have to understand that what we were successful at is getting people to see this thing that historically has been treated as a liability as a real asset. Governors are going out and staking their name on joining this. Utah and Tennessee both made their applications public and they are awesome.

H

Host58:25

Well, that is a successful narrative shift. So that's bottleneck one to AI deployment is energy. Now we can back away from nuclear. We actually think that's moving in the right direction. So what's next?

S

Seth Cohen58:41

Right now data centers are facing a tremendous amount of issues in the United States. A lot of it is public.

H

Host58:47

Deeply popular with like 5% of the country, less on a good day. But these things are critical national assets. We want to help shift the narrative in order to make AI deployment in the United States possible and make sure we remain competitive with China. I am dancing around what it is exactly we do, part of that is because we are in stealth.

We'll come back on the show as soon as you're ready to come out of stealth.

S

Seth Cohen59:19

Thank you guys so much for having me on. Pleasure. Great to meet you. Enjoy the conference.

H

Host59:25

I will tell everyone about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Let's go through the rest of the news, get you up to speed before Lisa Su joins in about 25 minutes.

Google has the muscle to overpower spending worries, says the Wall Street Journal. Google has put up some very impressive cloud growth numbers. There was some back and forth on the nature of that revenue with SemiAnalysis sort of jokingly posting 'Google Cloud generates revenue primarily from the sale of TPU systems.' The actual line that changed in the SEC filing is that Google Cloud generates product revenues primarily from the sale of TPU systems, which is a little confusing because you think of a company's product as their business, but they have services as well. It's not that Google Cloud is fully pivoting to TPU sales, it's that it's becoming meaningful.

C

Co-Host1:00:36

Yes, yes, they've sold them to a number of labs and they're seeing lots of progress.

H

Host1:00:42

And that was rewind a year. That was still a question.

C

Co-Host1:00:45

Yes. We can go through a number of posts here. We can take you through Eric Seufert talking back and forth about Suvinderators putting a little bit of truth zone on Google ads growth. What's going on there? They saw a lot of growth in monetized LLM queries. First, I'm going to tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.

H

Host1:01:14

Just do it.

C

Co-Host1:01:15

So it's a bit of a longer post, but it all started with Sundar Pichai's news. He said Q2 was an amazing quarter with our AI investments redefining what's possible across every part of our business. Alphabet revenue grew 24% year-over-year and Google Cloud accelerated to 82% growth, which is insane. And that needs the fog horn for sure. We saw exciting momentum across the board from search to YouTube to the Gemini app. Our model APIs are processing 22 billion tokens a minute. The numbers have gotten so big on tokens per minute, tokens per month that it's hard to keep in sync with what's actually impressive until you see a full chart. That's driven by their workhorse Flash model. They've been focused on very efficient token generation because they vend them into so many Google systems for effectively free because they're still monetizing via advertising. Max Anderson said, 'As someone who has personally spent $500,000 a month plus on Google ads for years, I can tell you with certainty, this revenue growth in search is artificial and extremely unhealthy for Google's business long term.' Little bit of fear, uncertainty, doubt. Search volumes are declining as legacy search is being increasingly cannibalized by non-monetized LLM queries. Google's response: manufacture revenue growth via short-sighted, highly extractive, customer-hostile tactics, i.e. charge advertisers more for lower quality clicks, including clicks they do not want. The Suvinderator comes in and says, 'Unfortunately, every claim made in this viral thread is either false or mischaracterizes Google's policy. Search volumes are not declining. Google stated in its Q2 earnings that search usage hit an all-time high during the World Cup. Also in Q1, search queries reached an all-time high. Ads and AI overviews monetize in parity with those in legacy search. Google's search revenue increased 19% in Q1 and 17% in Q2. He also debunks the idea that Google silently deprecated the second price auction. Google still uses generalized second price auction for search. He also debunks the idea that Google had precise keyword targeting settings that allowed advertisers to pick individual search phrases. So there's a lot of context there.

H

Host1:04:00

Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more. Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Over in the Wall Street Journal, Alphabet rides cloud business revenue jump 24%, but data center outlays push cash flow into the red. This has been telegraphed for a long time. They're investing in the AI boom. Google parent company Alphabet posted 24% revenue growth year-over-year in Q2, fueled by its booming cloud business. But concern over its heavy spending on AI infrastructure damped investor enthusiasm. Alphabet sales came in at $119.8 billion, exceeding analyst expectations. Cloud business brought in $24.8 billion, search business generated $63 billion. Net income was $112 billion for the April-June period, also ahead of expectations. They beat primarily driven by gains in other companies' stocks that Alphabet owns, like almost $100 billion of SpaceX. In other AI news in the Wall Street Journal, two big AI infrastructure stories. You have Lisa Su herself right here. AMD and Anthropic sign AI gear deal. We talked to AJ a little bit about that. OpenAI boosts cloud spend to $750 billion. New projects in Georgia data center will be part of efforts to increase capacity. OpenAI has raised its projected spending on computing power to around $750 billion through 2030, up from a projection of roughly $600 billion. A huge number. Given the most recent leg up based on coding agents, a lot of people are looking at that positively as a sign of continued faith in progress and scaling laws because we are in the scaling era.

C

Co-Host1:06:19

Serious momentum.

H

Host1:06:20

Yeah. The increase reflects new agreements with cloud computing providers as OpenAI races to lock up enormous amounts of computing capacity. OpenAI's spending on cloud computing has become a central focus of CEO Sam Altman's leadership team. The company said Wednesday it would invest $20 billion to kick off a data center called Project Camila in Effingham County, Georgia. Also, Nvidia has a supplier that's...

C

Co-Host1:06:52

You ever been to Georgia?

H

Host1:06:53

Yes, I've been to Atlanta. It's a great town.

C

Co-Host1:06:55

Got to visit.

H

Host1:06:56

You've never been?

C

Co-Host1:06:58

Maybe on a layover. It's like LA.

H

Host1:06:59

I don't think I've been outside.

C

Co-Host1:07:00

It's like Los Angeles. You're in the car for half an hour driving in traffic to get everywhere.

H

Host1:07:05

But it's a really nice city.

Liang Wenfeng over at DeepSeek had an investor call. I don't have context on how this actually came up because they're a hedge fund and they have DeepSeek still private. They're raising outside capital now. So this was probably part of that road show. I think at a certain point he needs to raise enough money that you got to just get on Zoom and sell the dream. But he was grinding for 4 hours just monologuing for four. I don't know if he's monologuing for all four, but it is sort of a long call.

C

Co-Host1:07:40

That's bullish though.

H

Host1:07:42

It is.

C

Co-Host1:07:42

Because if you can go and basically do a Joe Rogan podcast episode just monologuing.

H

Host1:07:49

No, it's just like, can somebody actually carry a conversation for that long? Because after you know this has always been your take on Joe Rogan, it gets interesting after an hour when people go off script. And so if a CEO can carry a conversation for four hours straight and still be compelling, it's bullish. But there are some details that Zephr shared from Catrini. Their inference margins are around 85%, strong. They only had around 20,000 Hopper equivalents until May.

C

Co-Host1:08:27

That doesn't mean they don't have access to a lot more power globally. Some of which may or may not be above board, but who knows? They have $1 billion in API revenue, enough to turn the company cash flow positive. And they have a GPU payback period of 10 months, hardware depreciated over 3 to 5 years. So looking quite good over the pond. He also shared a lot of philosophy that felt derivative of Western AI lab leaders' thought. He was focused on the same language: 'We don't want to optimize for pure profit. We're on the path to AGI first.' He said he's very focused on the path to AGI, not doing world models, image generation, video generation, or even a chat app. He doesn't want to be the next Alibaba. Purely focused on the path to AGI. We'll see. They've been out of the game with Moonshot coming from behind with K3 and a lot of hype, and GLM as well. So it will be interesting to see what he has up his sleeve after this investor call.

H

Host1:09:46

Before we move on, let me tell you about Console. You see it on the laptops. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.

Gong moment. Cognition is acquiring interaction, the makers of Poke. Huge.

C

Co-Host1:10:07

I think Poke has been an acquisition target for a long time now. They've been able to deliver delightful, novel products. I wouldn't have expected them to go to Cognition. I think a lot of people were thinking they'd get picked up by a big consumer company, maybe an Apple.

H

Host1:10:30

Were people saying Apple?

C

Co-Host1:10:31

An Apple would have been amazing. Having the Poke team working on Siri would be quite cool. Could have seen them go into OpenAI or really any, even Amazon. So a little bit unexpected. But not surprised that Scott saw potential in the team. I'm interested to see how these businesses merge. Will they keep Poke around or fold it into Cognition? Either way, excited to see what they build.

H

Host1:11:03

Yeah. Let me tell you about Figma agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. There's an older article in the Wall Street Journal that we never got to read, but it's fun because it tells a story of a young person who literally listened to a podcast and started a search fund and made millions of dollars.

C

Co-Host1:11:29

Did the meme.

H

Host1:11:30

Yeah. Did the meme. This shortcut to private equity riches is minting young millionaires. I saw Sal Khan from Khan Academy talking about something adjacent because Khan Academy is open-source education. You can learn everything you learn in college from Khan Academy watching videos and doing their online coursework. I believe it's nonprofit.

C

Co-Host1:11:56

It's still crazy that Khan Academy exists and plenty of people still turn it down.

H

Host1:12:02

Yes. Oh, they do. This person didn't though. Basically, go-getters are backing to buy up HVAC outlet outfits and specialized manufacturers. If they...

Make it back alive, there's a lot of money to be made. What a quote from the Wall Street Journal. So, in 2015, Bakari Akil was a homeless college dropout with a single focus: figuring out how to get rich. Sleeping in WeWork, on the subway, in airport waiting areas. Akil watched videos, listened to podcasts, and pored over personal finance books. He needed to own a business, he decided. But how to do it with no money? Then Akil read a Harvard Business School case study that described how MBA graduates were running around the country trying to buy companies with money from something called a search fund. He felt like he had discovered a secret. In the decades since, Akil, now 37, has bought two multi-million dollar companies. He has spent each month of the past three years living in a different country. So he's doing the nomad HVAC companies.

J

John1:13:13

I guess we'll get into it. He's now worth seven figures. Akil is part of a growing wave of people looking for a shortcut to private equity riches. Armed with grit and determination, they are ditching the well-worn path from spreadsheet-wielding associate to managing director and finding ways to buy HVAC and plumbing outfits, specialized manufacturers, and other small and mid-size businesses. Financing for such deals is a far cry from traditional private equity where firms use funds they raise from institutional investors and the ultra wealthy plus debt. Instead, these would-be business owners scrape together financing on a deal-by-deal basis. They use loans from the U.S. Small Business Administration, seek funds raised from specialized investors, or cobble together money from friends, family offices, private equity funds, and SBA licensed small business investment companies. And that's just the start. Convincing the owner to sell and executing an improvement plan is a daunting task, even for the most experienced dealmakers. While these buyers typically

H

Host1:14:09

You're overseas constantly. Yeah, I mean I imagine that he's overseas now, but during the heyday he was actually going and knocking on doors. But the reason I brought up Salcon was that he was advocating for instead of college, buy your child a business, or take a group of peers your child's age and they can buy a business together. Because if you look at the cost of college,

J

John1:14:42

Yeah,

H

Host1:14:42

You know, $200,000, $250,000 sometimes. If you get four students and they're effectively the executive team and you say, 'Look, we have a million dollars in cash. We're going to lever something up. So, we're going to of net income.'

J

John1:14:57

Yeah.

H

Host1:14:59

And we're going to lever it up.

J

John1:15:00

Yeah. And the cash flow is going to pay your salary. So, you're going to have a job. Yeah.

H

Host1:15:03

From 18 to 22 when you graduate, and your job is just to learn everything on the fly. And best case, you wind up with a fantastic business that makes a bunch of money, but worst case, you're no worse off than the money that you would have spent on college. And so, you get to learn all these skills on the fly. I don't know if it'll take off. It feels like alpha school adjacent.

J

John1:15:26

Well, when the time comes,

H

Host1:15:27

Yeah,

J

John1:15:28

Maybe we can get all the kids and say,

H

Host1:15:30

I mean, it's hard to predict what the world would be like in 15 or 20 years if you're just having kids now, but it doesn't seem that crazy to imagine. But I think the aura of certain schools will endure and that will be the right path for some people. Anyway, I view these guys as the homesteaders of the Wild West, said Albertch, who previously represented a big private equity firm at a law firm, Gibson and Dunn. They're heading out without a dollar to their name, and if they make it back alive, there's a lot of money to be made. Many caught the bug at a top business school where entrepreneurship through acquisition courses are now a standard part of the curriculum. They are drawn by the promise of a more flexible schedule, a conviction in their own operational know-how, and a desire to avoid grunt work that ends up lining the pockets of others. Fueling their rise, a perception that it isn't as easy as it once was to make big money on Wall Street. It makes sense. A lot of the big private equity firms were founded decades ago, have founders and partnerships that have accrued a lot of the value, and it's much harder to just scale up something new. The private equity industry is struggling to profitably unload companies, causing mid-level employees dubious of their chances of receiving pay tied to deal performance to jump ship. Some 77 search funds, money from specialized investors to back individuals looking to buy businesses, were raised in 2025. 77 new search funds listed according to an annual study conducted by researchers at Stanford in 2025. That feels low based on how big the meme was all throughout 2025. Maybe

J

John1:17:05

There's no way that that's accurate.

H

Host1:17:08

Yeah. Maybe there are some that aren't being caught in the definition, or they have defined their company as a true private equity firm instead of a search fund. So they said, 'No, we're not a search fund' even though they might actually be acting as one.

J

John1:17:23

But that is historically high. Although down from the 2023 peak of 101, there were 101 search funds founded in 2023. Meanwhile, the number of firms doing deals as independent sponsors without a fund has roughly doubled to 400. So, there's a whole bunch of different stuff going on. There are other stories in here. Caroline Sabat bought a Boston area plumbing business in 2025 and merged it with a smaller one she and her husband had started. They got joint degrees from Harvard's business and government schools after nearly 10 years in the US Navy. He was a former Navy SEAL and he launched Minuteman Plumbing, Heating and Cooling with a master plumber he met through a Harvard mentor between graduation and starting his job at a consulting firm. They took over running the business and grew it. All of a sudden, I'm working 15-hour days on this plumbing business, Caroline, now 35, who managed a crew of nine as a flight naval officer. It was going well, but not well enough that you can light your high-paying consulting gig on fire. Caroline decided to buy a business to kickstart growth. She found one that they could finance with an SBA loan. These typically come with a lower interest rate than a bank loan, and because they are government-backed, they did have to personally guarantee the loan. Caroline also had to take out a life insurance policy. She bought the business for 1.8 times EBITDA for a tiny fraction of what most private equity firms pay. So not too bad to get very subscale.

H

Host1:18:49

Yeah. Otherwise,

J

John1:18:50

Working for someone younger than me and having to live life one PowerPoint slide at a time was torture, he said, and he quit his consulting job. Anyway, there's another interesting Google news. Google released this massive study, I think it's like a hundred pages, about the impact of AI, and they have a very unique data set obviously because Google is vended like that AI is vended into Google search and all the different tools and the API. And they say AI is helping workers, not replacing them. We've been hearing glimmers of this and people sort of saying they're backing off of what they were saying before, like the massive job displacement. Maybe it's not coming right now.

H

Host1:19:35

If you use your own eyes and ears instead of reading

J

John1:19:39

Like thought pieces or sci-fi or something. Yeah. Oh yeah, that too. You know,

H

Host1:19:44

It's all over here.

J

John1:19:46

Then you know

H

Host1:19:47

Oh, what? Okay, cool. We will be joined by Lisa Su in a little bit. But for now we'll go back to the Google study that says AI is helping workers, not replacing them. So one of the looming worries about artificial intelligence is that it will automate away jobs. This worry certainly has been looming. A report from researchers at Google released Thursday says that so far the technology is mainly being used as an aid to workers. It's a yes-and technology. It is a finding that, if holds true as AI continues to develop, could point to a future where the demand for highly skilled workers is accentuated rather than diminished. Just because you're using AI doesn't mean it's going to automate your job, said Google economist Scott Strand, one of the researchers. The stakes are high for Google parent Alphabet. Google operates Gemini, one of the most popular AI platforms. Public backlash to AI is intensifying with stark fears about job loss and anger over the buildout of data centers across the country. Some large corporations that have laid off employees in the past year have said that they were able to downsize because of AI. Yet the US unemployment rate overall remains relatively low. And economists remain split on whether the technology will ultimately eliminate jobs or simply make workers more productive. We can continue chatting about this in a minute, but let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business's AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. We are going to be adjusting our audio setup. I think we will be joined in just a few minutes. Are you ditching your, are you going full bandana for the interview? Is that what you're thinking? I don't know. Anyway, I think

J

John1:21:39

I got to get the backstory on the bandanas. You don't typically think of AMD and this sort of western themed bandana, but now I do.

H

Host1:21:49

I mean, I don't know. John, did you know

J

John1:21:53

Cowboys?

H

Host1:21:53

That we landed on the moon before we put wheels on luggage?

J

John1:21:58

That's impossible.

H

Host1:22:00

That's what they're saying, John. We put a man on the moon before anyone put wheels on suitcases.

J

John1:22:05

How is that possible? No one thought to put wheels on. This is aim to lab.

H

Host1:22:10

People were just like

J

John1:22:12

That 1970 was the first time that we thought, why don't we put

H

Host1:22:15

It would be great to put those things from the car on my luggage. If only we could miniaturize the technology.

J

John1:22:19

If it can be done, we should do it.

H

Host1:22:23

Yeah, we

J

John1:22:24

But if no one's done it before, it might be impossible.

H

Host1:22:26

It's sort of a moonshot project. That is actually a crazy statistic. I mean, that's like the what? Sharks are older than trees. Isn't that a thing?

J

John1:22:35

I think sharks have existed in the ocean since before trees or something. That's one of those brain teaser things. Anyway, what else is in the timeline? I'm trying to pull up this AI study because there were some interesting details in here. The researchers characterize the use of AI as shallow in most occupations. Workers are only using AI for a relatively small slice of the tasks they do. We were talking to Travis Kalanick about this yesterday. Truck driver, what's the job? Is it to drive the vehicle or is it also to protect the vehicle? Is it also to do small repairs on the vehicle? Handle logistics with the vehicle. Driving is just one of the tasks. And so even if you have a level four, level five self-driving system, you might still have someone in the vehicle for a long time. And that's like the most automatable task that people have been working on for 20 years now and it's still not quite there. The other interesting thing you were asking about is what is the next leg up? What is the next thing that causes another order of magnitude boom in token consumption basically, or revenue or whatever metric you want to measure the AI boom through. And there are just diffusion elements, right? The number of people that are using coding agents is still small, and you could just see diffusion that way, but there is

H

Host1:24:04

Yeah, I think there's some data. US households that pay for AI products is still

J

John1:24:11

Well below two digits, somewhere around 5%. Yeah, I do think that

H

Host1:24:16

Part of that is like there's just a lot of households that

J

John1:24:20

Are not going to pay for AI, at least directly.

H

Host1:24:23

There is just the, going back to the meter chart which showed the amount of time that an AI agent can work on its own. We're in this reliable agent paradigm, but I think people might be undercounting what a willingness to run a prompt that will run for a week and give you a result. We're not quite there. Or maybe it needs to be more communicative. Maybe the system needs to get back and forth with you. But people just aren't, it's still very early adopter to the type of person that fires something off. Most people at least want to check in with the system in 20 minutes or 1 hour increments. So,

Well, you know who's optimistic about AI, John?

J

John1:25:13

Who?

H

Host1:25:14

Friend of the show, Mark Zuckerberg.

J

John1:25:16

Oh, yeah.

H

Host1:25:17

Mark has launched a new campaign that is focused on AI optimism. In Axios, Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday laid out an optimistic view of the agentic future, arguing the company's focus on connecting the world will only be strengthened by new AI tools and technologies. Axios says why it matters. His position is framed as a stark contrast to some of Meta AI's competitors who, according to a video ad posted with Zuckerberg's comments, promote fear and a dystopian vision of the future.

J

John1:25:50

I thought it was a cool video. I liked it. It's interesting to imagine watching it not as a fan of social media though, because it's leaning a lot on 'we've connected people, we bring people together' and I certainly see it that way when I log on to Meta Platforms. I'm sending you funny reels, we're having a blast, but a lot of people see it as brain rot, right? And they're like, 'Oh, if you're going to do what you just did to the next thing, I'm not certain. I'm not fully on board.' So, I don't know how it'll be received. The production value was fantastic. It's definitely the correct angle. The opposite is worse. Like clearly you want to be optimistic and I'm really glad that he's not going down the fear-based path.

H

Host1:26:32

Oh god. Yes. That would be very rough.

J

John1:26:35

Working for some players.

H

Host1:26:38

Anyway, so we'll see how it lands.

J

John1:26:42

Mhm.

H

Host1:26:42

What else is going on? Paramount is moving into micro dramas. This is the moment you've been waiting for. You love dramatic movies.

J

John1:26:55

I don't know.

H

Host1:26:55

Can I interest you in some micro dramas? Have you tried any of the real shorts?

J

John1:27:01

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I watched a true crime one and I felt like I was actually fine with the AI video and voice over element of it. What I felt was missing was when you're tracking a true crime story and you turn on a podcast about that true crime, I like being led through a meandering idea maze of what is interesting to that host. So maybe they find the town and the details about the town where something happened particularly interesting and so they're just putting in random facts that flesh out the story in a particular way. I felt like the one I watched was very much the Wikipedia level summary or the headlines just condensed and it was too generic and it wasn't giving me enough novelty and new facts. So even though the video wasn't quite there, it was obviously AI, it wasn't super visually striking, the audio was sort of jilted, that all would have been fine if it had been someone who actually went and found some really deep interesting novel way to tell the story or novel details that otherwise you wouldn't have heard of from the headlines. So I don't know. Still early but I don't think they're going to get me. There's something about going to the theater. It's an experience. It's the anti-brand. You put your were to turn the screen sideways.

H

Host1:28:29

They've done that. There's somebody in Brooklyn, I think, put together a whole like we're going to watch Instagram reels together or TikToks. It was like a short form film festival or something.

J

John1:28:40

Yeah. I mean, at some point you have to do a premiere. Kareem from Subway Takes was talking about that. He was like, 'You know, I've had this show. It's a massive hit. It's breakthrough. Where's my premiere?' And like maybe there should be a premiere for the next season of Subway Takes whenever that happens. I mean, it's also just the hard thing with social media shows is that there isn't really a season. It's just sort of always on. We sort of fake this with What are you laughing at?

H

Host1:29:02

Something I'm not going to read. Tyler, who's back in the studio, said, 'I've been watching this on real short and I'm just not going to read the title because

J

John1:29:11

Oh, no. You can imagine it gets pretty clickbaity in there. You can definitely imagine that.

H

Host1:29:19

Yeah, this doesn't look like if Apple knew that this was on there, they might ask them to take it down

J

John1:29:27

Potentially. Potentially. Yeah, I do wonder where the line will be drawn. There's a whole new class of problems that Apple will have to grapple with. I thought this hilarious screenshot from Var epsilon was very funny where it's just I couldn't solve the Riemann hypothesis. I couldn't solve the Hodge conjecture. I couldn't solve P versus NP. I couldn't solve Navier-Stokes. This is just every really challenging millennium prize or unsolvable math problem. We've been working on our own conjectures. We're creating because all the conjectures are solved. Well, I mean, we actually built it out. I think it was 2009.

H

Host1:30:11

Yeah, I remember back. But we've been letting it sit because we just didn't have the technology. We didn't have the capability.

J

John1:30:17

Yeah.

H

Host1:30:18

We needed AI to advance and I think we're going to be close to cracking it. But we should release the conjecture and let everybody kind of take their own shot.

J

John1:30:27

Speaking of conjecture, there's a lot of conjecture about what OpenAI is releasing today. Tibo said, 'Unbelievably excited for what's coming together. Tomorrow is feeling codeexy.' People are speculating that it might be a cerebrous, a faster version of soul turbo mode. It is okay

H

Host1:30:44

Voice is now in the desktop app. Control your computer and direct multiple agents running GPT work or codecs using just your voice.

J

John1:30:50

It's powered by GPT live. So it can speak, listen, and coordinate work in the app at the same time.

H

Host1:30:56

And then also health is rolling out to users everywhere. Health in ChatGPT. You can securely connect Apple Health and supported medical records to understand your information.

J

John1:31:07

Oo, got to get it on there for sure.

H

Host1:31:10

There's also a new law introduced, a bipartisan AI kill switch bill following the OpenAI cyber incident. The bill enters Congress as lawmakers remain divided on how aggressively the federal government should regulate artificial intelligence. I'm sure this will be a longer conversation on a future show.

J

John1:31:33

Sheil Monot is sharing some interesting nuggets in an information article on Stripe,

H

Host1:31:40

Which we will be getting to.

J

John1:31:42

Let me tell you about Cisco

H

Host1:31:45

Next episode.

J

John1:31:47

Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. And we have Lisa Su joining us in just a minute. We're about to bring her on to the show. And thank you for tuning in. Thank you to everyone who makes the show possible.

H

Host1:32:02

This is the moment we've all been waiting for.

J

John1:32:04

It is. It is. And thank you to Ramp for making it possible. Time is money. Say both.

H

Host1:32:10

Welcome to the show, Lisa. Thank you so much for coming on. We appreciate you being here. Such a busy day. Thank you so much. Please grab a seat if you wouldn't mind putting that headset on. We will hear you loud and clear. How is today going?

L

Lisa Su1:32:28

It is a fantastic day.

H

Host1:32:30

Yes. What have been the highlights?

L

Lisa Su1:32:32

Well, it's wonderful to see just everyone, all of our community here. Customers, partners, certainly a lot of developers here, and we're seeing a lot of excitement.

H

Host1:32:45

Take us back to 2014. How is 2026 different? Not just in terms of the AI boom, but as a leader emotionally, is this a more stressful time because everything's happening so fast, or is this just a more exciting time? What is your life like as CEO of AMD right now?

L

Lisa Su1:33:08

Well, I have to say, when I think about this entire arc from 2014 until now, the thing that has been perhaps most interesting to me is that the world is like a different place. Every year, every two years, you see the tech trends are different. You see the customer needs are different. You see the marketplace changing. And that's what kept it really exciting for me because it's one of those things where you're never going to get bored. It is certainly not less stressful, so I can tell you that. I think what's different about AI right now is the rate and pace of change is actually much faster. Semiconductors has always been a fast-paced environment, but the rate and pace of change of the adoption curve of AI and how the technology is changing and how the ecosystem is changing has us constantly on the 'hey, we got to go faster.' That's the primary thing. We're in a business where you make decisions three to five years in advance on your technology roadmaps, and you realize, man, we can even go faster, and that's what the market wants. I think there's so much more external pressure in a way that the computing industry and the technology industry in general just hasn't had. Well, I view it as actually a really good thing. People ask me that from time to time, and the reason I view it as a good thing is because we're in a place where everybody needs compute. Everybody wants compute. Every country wants compute. Every hyperscaler wants compute. All of us are using it. So we're the components under the covers. We're actually helping drive how technology is being consumed. And so I think that's the difference. It's much more front and center versus just something that only techies know about.

H

Host1:35:02

Yeah. Culturally, what is the state of AMD's culture? Because there's one view where you're at the center of the AI boom, it's the best place to work, and at the same time things are changing, you have to move faster, there's a little bit of anxiety across every employee base around what my job will look like in a decade. How are things changing for the employees of AMD?

L

Lisa Su1:35:25

Well, I think I'd take a step back and say, why do I wake up every day? What are people at AMD really excited about? We're really excited about putting great tech out there. Our mantra, our number one mantra, is build great products. It's about how do we keep pushing the envelope on that. So you have a day like today, or this week which has been a culmination of years and years of work. You think about launching Helios, launching Venice, bringing together the entire ecosystem, and you're like, it's days like today that we're working so hard for. And I think the culture is one of wanting to be the best in the industry. Our goal is to drive the future of technology, and we do it the AMD way. What does the AMD way mean? We do it in partnership. We do it in collaboration. We believe in open ecosystems. We believe in using the best technology for each workload. So this idea that one company's going to have the killer chip, I don't think that's the world we're in today.

H

Host1:36:37

Is that always the AMD way? We had Travis Kalanick on the show yesterday and he started off saying, 'The Uber way,' and then he stopped himself and said, 'Well, the Travis way,' and he laid out his approach. Was this approach something that you feel like the company had in 2014, or were these pillars things that you felt were important going forward and you've added some over time?

L

Lisa Su1:37:09

Well, I would say what has been the foundation of AMD, back to Jerry Sanders, our founder, has always been about pushing the envelope and, in some sense, being risk-takers, wanting to have the best roadmaps out there. That has always been the foundation of AMD. I think the last 10 plus years, hopefully what I've brought to it, what Mark Papermaster our CTO has brought, what the leadership has brought, is a sense of not only are we going to put the best technology out there, but we're going to be predictable, we're going to be great partners, and we're going to do it in a way that brings together the ecosystem. I have to say, everything about tech, I was so happy to see Tom Brown of Anthropic with us, Santo Meta Satchin of OpenAI, Jeremy at AT&T, G2 was here. And what you kind of get from all of that is that partnership is not just a word. Partnership is kind of our foundation. I'm a big believer that one plus one is greater than three. So obviously we have to have great tech, but we also have to be able to see the future through a broad lens. The way you do that is having great partners along the way. So that's very much the foundation of today's AMD culture.

H

Host1:38:31

What were some of the highlights of Tom's talk earlier? He was talking about how AI is actually speeding up their ability to adopt new hardware and bring new systems online. But what were the highlights for you?

L

Lisa Su1:38:44

Well, I'm super excited to be able to talk about it. We have very much wanted Anthropic on AMD for a long time, and we just had to find the right intersection point of our technology with where they are. Claude has been incredibly successful, and probably the highlight for me was he told that story on stage about the MI355, and that's a very true story. A few months ago, my guys were like, 'Hey, we think Anthropic is on 355s and they're doing work on it.' And I'm like, 'Okay, make sure you know what they're doing. Make sure we're helping them.' And they're like, 'Lisa, they don't really want our help. They don't really need our help. They're able to do it with Claude.' And I'm like, 'Wow, that's incredible.' So he told the story, but it's just a lot about how the ecosystem has evolved over time. I'm a big believer in AI as an incredible force multiplier. It's true across every industry, but it's especially true across our world, which is putting great technology out there. If we can reduce our time to market, the time it takes from us to start an idea to when we actually finish and ship a product, if we can shave three months off of that or six months off of that, that has tremendous value for our customers. You heard Satchin say, 'More compute faster.' That is a frequent conversation I have. More compute faster. And these are really complicated systems. I will absolutely say they're really complicated systems, and we need to make sure that we are able to put it all together, and that's where AI can be tremendously helpful on both hardware and software.

H

Host1:40:39

Yeah. You mentioned not focusing on just the one single chip. AMD has a lineage in CPU, GPU, FPGA, many other systems. What are the advantages of having that breadth of product scope, and are there any disadvantages to that?

L

Lisa Su1:41:01

Well, I think the interesting thing is every so often you hear, 'This is the killer chip,' right? GPUs are going to take over the world. CPUs are dead. We're going to move every single workload over. And the world just doesn't work like that. Our thought process has always been, people asked me very early on, 'Hey Lisa, why don't you just focus? Decide whether it's CPUs or GPUs. Why do you need both?' And I think about each one of these questions deeply. We fundamentally believe that there is no one-size-fits-all. The world is a heterogeneous world. You are different than I am. We have different needs. We have different workloads. Our businesses are different. You're going to need different compute. I think the portfolio that we have, CPUs, GPUs, we acquired Xilinx so we brought the physical AI component in there, we have a rich PC ecosystem, allows you to truly pick the right compute. Now it's a little bit harder. We have a tremendous number of R&D priorities, but I think we've done it in a very smart way in the sense that each part of our product portfolio builds on each other. We talk about triplets being a big thing that we do, and we do that across our CPU portfolio, our GPU portfolio. It's an example of how we're able to leverage getting the right compute for the right workload.

H

Host1:42:42

Yeah. Talk about the other slice of the business, the other segmentation between consumer, prosumer, enterprise. How valuable, how important is it to have a clear chain of products, in particular with talent? It feels like a lot of folks will start on a consumer rig and they might build some small model or they might be doing CGI work or something else and they're using a Threadripper to render something locally, and then eventually they move to the cloud and eventually they start working in an enterprise. How is that going to evolve?

L

Lisa Su1:43:23

I think it is extremely important because people access technology in different ways. Not everyone is going to a big cloud instance to experience AI. The fact that we do have a consumer roadmap, a prosumer roadmap, Ryzen, Radeon, we're putting a lot more emphasis on some of these other ways to access AI. We made a big investment in AI PCs. I still believe that local AI is going to be one of the key enablers to truly get all of the tokens that you need in different places. Our Ryzen AI Max portfolio, I think physical AI is another place where we just launched these small robotics form factors so that people can experiment with it. So I do think it's quite important to have a low barrier of entry. I want people to experience AMD and have a wonderful experience, and hey, they may end up being in the largest frontier model companies or the amount of startups that are doing just amazing technology is fantastic, and we want to support those as well.

H

Host1:44:43

How do you think about longshot R&D? You have your existing roadmap, but we talk to new chip companies very frequently on the show. It feels like every week there's somebody new that has a billion dollars and they're on to something, and I can't imagine you haven't thought of it or at least the AMD team hasn't thought of it. So how do you think about some of these investments in R&D that are maybe higher risk but high potential over the long run?

L

Lisa Su1:45:15

Well, we are in a world where there is a long arc on R&D. I really do like to say, judge us on what we're doing today. The ideas were really thought of three to five years ago. Chiplets, networking, optimization, CPU and GPU, putting that together in Helios, that's really unfolded over the last three or four years. Today we're thinking about what's beyond the roadmap. I think both are very important. We do have a tremendous number of new ideas. No question, very active research team. Our team is working on not just MI500 today, MI600, lots and lots of ideas. We're spending time with our top customers talking about, 'Tell me where the models are going. What are you thinking the workloads will need?' so that we can put that flexibility and capability into our roadmap. But I want to give credit where credit is due. There are a growing number of startups. It used to be that people only did software startups because hardware was too hard. It took too long. And now it's easy, so everyone's doing it. I'm joking. It is not easy, but it's appreciated. That's what I want to say. It's appreciated. And part of this software singularity that it feels like in some ways we're already in, VCs are just feeling more confident underwriting risk on the hardware side. I don't know that I would feel more or less, but I would definitely say that there's been a change. People didn't necessarily have the patience for hardware before because it's a long arc on hardware. Now I think there's an appreciation that fundamentally, hardware, silicon, software, systems, when you optimize together, you're going to get a significantly better result. So my view is lots of good ideas out there. I think one of the things I pride myself on within AMD is we are quite open to new ideas. We've gotten to the place where I'm really happy with the acquisitions that we've done. We've brought in some incredibly talented individuals who have had a huge impact on our AI roadmap. Certainly, a lot of people know Nod.ai out there, one of our acquisitions, who is doing an incredible job trying to make sure that everyone who wants to use ROCm is going to get our support. Our Pensando acquisition, our Xilinx acquisition, our ZT acquisition, all of these were to bring the components in that help us build the full system solution.

H

Host1:48:00

Well, we know you're busy. Thank you so much. We have a gong. We'd love you to hit it to commemorate this day.

L

Lisa Su1:48:06

Do I get to do this?

H

Host1:48:08

Please, as hard as you want.

L

Lisa Su1:48:10

Boom. There we go. Right here.

H

Host1:48:13

Thank you so much. And speaking of hardware companies, consumer hardware, they're hard, we have an AMD powered Chromatic from Mod Retro, the M64. You want to sign right here next to AMD?

L

Lisa Su1:48:26

Perfect.

H

Host1:48:27

There we go.

L

Lisa Su1:48:27

Is this one of yours or is it Dylan's over there?

H

Host1:48:30

Dylan. All right. We're good friends of the team over there. We love consumer hardware and all these things. So, thank you for powering it and for coming on the show and congratulations on everything. Thanks. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great day. And that's our show, folks. Thank you so much for tuning in to TBPN live from AMD. We are traveling tomorrow. We'll be back on Monday, 11:00 a.m. Pacific.

J

John1:48:57

Thank you to the team here who flew up and thank you to everyone at AMD for making this possible. We really appreciate dialing in these IRL shows.

H

Host1:49:05

Yeah, we're getting there. One step at a time.

J

John1:49:08

The team makes it look easy.

H

Host1:49:10

Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com and we will see you on Monday 11 a.m. sharp for another one.

J

John1:49:19

Goodbye.

H

Host1:49:20

Cheers.

AMD CEO Lisa Su Live on TBPN

About Lisa Su