How AMD's Lisa Su Views the Future of AI

0:00When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments.

0:35It's weeknight dinners, sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now at palmolive.com. We're going to start with an executive who we think is the perfect start to our day. Her company is working at the cutting edge of the technology that we're all thinking about, artificial intelligence.

1:10As chair and CEO of AMD, Lisa Su has, over the past decade, transformed AMD into a leader in high performance and adaptive computing and made it one of the fastest growing semiconductor businesses in the world, with customers ranging from Subaru and Tesla to Microsoft and Google. An electrical engineer by training with a bachelor's, master's, and doctorate degrees from MIT. Lisa is also part of the new breed of tech sector leaders who combine deep technical expertise with strategic and management prowess. She's a proponent of responsible risk-taking, and she's probably the most prominent woman leader in tech.

1:50She's here to talk about the future of AI, the opportunities, the risks, and how we can best harness its power. Lisa, welcome. Thank you. It's great to be here with you this morning. Well, it's amazing to have you here and amazing to have you here kicking off this event. To the audience, as Allison said earlier, you can put your questions, any questions you have for Lisa, in the Ask the Speaker chat. We'll get to as many as we can later. So, Lisa, let's start with a basic question. For those who don't know you, maybe who don't know AMD beyond that it makes semiconductors, can you tell us a little bit about the company and how it has evolved?

2:22Yeah, absolutely. Well, look, it's really great to be here with you. AMD, we are a semiconductor company here, and really our focus is on building sort of the bleeding edge of semiconductors. So highest performing compute capability as well as adaptive computing. We are in sort of lots of different areas. So if you think about large data centers in the cloud or an enterprise, these are areas where we spend a lot of time, as well as in embedded devices. So think automotive, industrial, your test equipment, some of your aerospace capabilities, and then also in end user devices. So if you think about things like your PCs, your notebooks, your desktops, as well as, you know, if you happen to be a gamer, we're in a lot of your, you know, gaming, you know, gaming consoles and things like that as well.

3:16So lots of different areas. And the key underlying all of that is high performance computing. All right. That's that's super useful. And, you know, I'm going to have you be a little bit of a spokesperson for AI today. Just, you know, as I said before, we're all thinking about it. we're all trying to figure out, is it coming after us? Is it a tool we should use? So, you know, you're more the front end of all this. What, you know, what excites you about the technology? And, you know, how do you see AI, and maybe I'm talking about generative AI evolving, you know, in the next phase, let's say? Yeah, absolutely.

3:52So, I think if we take a step back and look at, you know, sort of the whole idea of AI or artificial intelligence, I mean, it's actually been around for quite some time. But what's really happened over the last, I don't know, let's call it 15, 16 months or so, you know, with the advent of, you know, chat GPT coming out and generative AI, I think what we've all understood is, you know, there's a superpower here. I mean, AI is really, you know, the most important technology that, you know, we've seen over the last, I don't know, let's call it 50 years. And, you know, when we look at the capability, it really has the capability to augment so many things.

4:31So, I mean, to your basic point of, you know, do we need to care and, you know, how important it is, it is, you know, really an opportunity to really accelerate all aspects of our business and, frankly, of humanity as well. And I think of it as advancing things like, you know, research and health care and all of those important aspects of our lives, as well as our businesses. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more.

5:12Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments. It's weeknight dinners. Sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean.

5:51And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now at palmolive.com. As well as our personal productivity, as well as things like content creation and all of these things are opportunities for us to use this technology that is now, let's call it, bringing it much closer to home where everyone can really practice AI in their daily lives. Are there use cases you've seen that maybe I haven't seen yet that have you excited? Anything you want to share with us? Well, I'll tell you some of the things. First of all, there's so many.

6:32So hopefully everyone's experienced it in in one shape or form. But perhaps the things that excite me the most are opportunities to transform things like health care. I mean, I view this as when we think about something like that that's actually very personal and being able to think about accelerating things like disease research and diagnoses and how doctors care for us. I think that's super exciting. In each of our businesses, I think there are huge ways of acceleration. I mean, I can talk about some of the things that we're doing at AMD. We're accelerating the way we build chips. And for us, everything is about how do we get more high-performance chips to market at higher quality, at better performance, at lower price and cost.

7:24All of those things are things that I find very exciting. And then there's just the personal stuff that we all get to play with and see that it really can change each of our personal productivity as well. If you're watching this, if you have questions for Lisa Sue, please put them in the chat box, and we will try to get to some of your questions later. So Lisa, I want to drill down a little bit on this. So every conversation about AI that I have eventually evolves into something very dark, that is AI an existentialist threat in some way to not just our jobs, but to our very existence. I'm assuming you're a relative techno-optimist, but help us out.

8:13If AI is going to be a force for good, how does that happen? Will it happen? Will technology save us from the downsides of technology? or do we all, all of us need to be contributing to the discussion now to make sure we don't get these, you know, the worst possible outcomes later? Well, as you said, I'm probably a techno optimist, but I'm actually a very, very pragmatic way of thinking about this is the technology is not perfect. Okay. As good as technology is, we're still in the very early stages of the deployment of AI. And we do know that, you know, the AIs are not always right. And so part of what we have to do as a set of leaders is figure out how to use the technology for good and also protect, you know, the downsides.

9:01And look, I think this is a very vibrant conversation. I think all of us are learning in the process. You know, I will say that, you know, I've personally learned a ton over the last 12 plus months in terms of how to apply AI even within our own company and also talking to many of my peers how things are going. And I think we all recognize that we're in a learning process, but the key is to be very active in that learning. So my belief, and I know there's a lot of doomsday theories about how AI is going to take over all of our jobs. You know, I actually am a subscriber to the belief that what we have to do as leaders of companies is to really learn how to harness the power of AI and also bring our employees along with that so that we're actually making our employees more productive and we're able to make our companies more productive, knowing that, you know, there are, you know.

10:00When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work? Use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast. That's indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments.

10:36It's weeknight dinners, sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now at palmolive.com. Some areas where we have to be careful with the use of AI. Yep, that's helpful. You know, there's also another aspect of this, which is just the balance between speed, you know, bringing products out to the market as quickly as possible, now that there is a market, versus caution, and that's reflected, you know, as you said, you're learning and there's things we don't know yet about the technology.

11:23How do you think about, from where you are at AMD, how do you think about this balance between speed and caution? Yeah, I really believe in fast experimentation and implementation. So I don't believe the answer is, let's slow down. I think what we have to do is experiment. Where we've spent time is we actually have a responsible AI council. I think, you know, all of us as leaders, you know, if you're leading, you know, companies or teams, you have to think about how to utilize the technology responsibly. We think about things about like intellectual property, you know, how to protect our intellectual property, as well as protecting our customers and our partners' intellectual property.

12:08But that being the case, I think the power of AI is finding those use cases that give you very, very significant return on investment. And, you know, we've seen in some of our workflows, like in some of our design workflows, we've seen what used to take, you know, weeks and months really come down to days. And when you think about how valuable that is to your enterprise, you have to really, you know, push the envelope on using the technology. And there are lots of, you know, lots of people who are out there to help in terms of experiences. I know that it's a very active conversation whenever I'm talking to my peer CEOs these days in terms of what are you learning?

12:50Where are the use cases that are most beneficial? What are the things to be careful about? So I think this active dialogue is really helpful. And I'd be interested in your advice for people who, when, well, let's say when ChatGPT came on the market, lots of people experimented with it and played around with it. And now, I don't know what wave we're on, but now it's, okay, but how do I actually use it? How do I actually apply it in my company? You mentioned healthcare, and people often mention healthcare as a clear use case, but that's very specialized. For the general audience here, what would your advice be?

13:30How do people figure out, I guess there are two things, how to protect themselves against being disrupted by AI solutions, but then maybe more pertinently, how do I use AI to improve my business, whether it's efficiency or something else? What's your advice for people who are even just trying to think through that problem? Yeah, I would say, again, look across the use cases and the workflows in your business. The places where it's obvious, very near-term successes can be in things called co-pilots or where AI is actually a helper to someone, to your employees. And, you know, I think about, you know, these types of co-pilot exercises, whether it's, you know, on the engineering side, we're using, you know, co-pilots to help us, you know, design code and really write code and to help us look at test cases and use cases, improve our quality, you know, those kinds of things.

14:36When I look at things that are more sort of business oriented, we're looking at how we use AI in our marketing and our communications and our content creation. Again, these co-pilots will allow you to, let's call it, get close to the answer. And then, of course, the final touches are being done by your expert employees. There are many, many cases like that. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes.

15:17Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments. It's weeknight dinners, sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together.

15:57Shop now at palmolive.com. that through every enterprise where you can think about workflows, where you can accelerate your time to get an answer. The places where, of course, you have to be a little bit more careful are places that you would rely more on the AI itself to come up with the answer. And there, you have to do a lot of testing to make sure that you get the right answers. But again, my advice is lots of pilots, experimentation, and then figuring out where it has the most value. We've certainly seen, as we've deployed AI across our business, that there are some places where very high value, very low barrier of entry.

16:39And then there are others where, frankly, the tasks are, you have to put sort of a lot more work into making sure that the models and the AI are more are adapted to your particular use case. So lots of experimentation and, you know, sort of, you know, really looking at where you can get the most bang for the buck in the near term. Yeah, thank you for that. So here's an audience question. This is Melissa Quillen, not sure where Melissa is, but the question is when it comes to AI, how are you anticipating, you know, returning real-time data, data mining, so that you can pivot your business almost immediately to current trends or to resolve issues that pop up?

17:20Yeah, absolutely. We have done, you know, there is quite a bit of work and we've also done, you know, work ourselves on looking at things like being more predictive in sales cycles and looking at some of the data that comes in to those trends. I would say that requires a bit of training on your business because, you know, not every every business is different. And there does need to be a bit of training on your specific data. But I do think that you can get some very nice patterns and trends that come give you insights of where to sort of dive to the next level of detail going going forward. Yeah.

17:58So I want to ask you about about your, you know, your run at AMD. You've been CEO now for about 10 years. You said early on that one of your goals was to bring focus to the company. How do you determine which businesses to prioritize and, you know, how do you get buy in? How do you how do you think about focus in that in that role? Yeah, so I've been at AMD about 12 years, CEO for almost 10 years. And, you know, one of the things that is true in every business around the world is that you have more opportunities than you have, you know, you know, people or resources or leadership bandwidth. And so for us at AMD, it was deciding really what are we going to be best at.

18:38And, you know, our heritage has been one of high performance computing and really building, you know, sort of at the at the bleeding edge of technology. And that was really, you know, our focus item. So there were some things that we had to choose not to do. Like, for example, you know, mobile phones are a very interesting part of semiconductors. There are lots of great companies in that area that wasn't the perfect area for AMD. And we just had to really choose the things that we were best at. So our focus was high performance computing before high performance computing was sexy. And now we can say between high performance computing and AI, we are in perhaps one of the most exciting areas, if not the most exciting area in semiconductors.

19:22And it has a lot to do with our heritage and focus. Yeah. So, I know your goal is to stay at the cutting edge of technology, the next innovation. This is a competitive industry. And when you're up against big players like NVIDIA, how do you do that? Well, the beauty of technology, and I like to say this very much, it is about building great products. And to really do that, we actually have to kind of see the future. We need to decide, hey, where's the industry going over the next three to five years? And we need to place big bets on technology.

20:23dot com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments. It's weeknight dinners, sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now at palmolive.com.

21:00And I think from that standpoint, it is one of those areas that is very rewarding if you make the right big bets. And we've made some very good bets, I think, as we look at technology going forward. I'm super excited about what we're doing in AI. It is, you know, it's sort of a confluence of events. I mean, generative AI has come into fruition. And the fact is, you know, everybody needs AI compute technology. And we're one of the very few companies in the world that can do that. And, you know, we've been, you know, really investing in this space for the last, you know, 10 years. So it is one of those places where you have to kind of, you know, see across the horizon.

21:40And with that, we invest very heavily in R &D and the key technologies to enable the next generation of products. I love your observation. Who knew this industry would be sexy? But you're having your moment, so that's great. So here's another audience question. This is Gajan Yogaswara, who's asking, how expensive versus accessible will AI technology be in the medium term? And the point is, given the large cost of materials required for building semiconductors, for employee headcount at the big producers like AMD, do you see the cost of accessing this technology will limit the ability of certain people, certain companies to take advantage of what it could offer?

22:20Yeah, you know, the great thing about technology, especially when you think about usage curves, is, you know, we're very cognizant of the fact that for technology to be most broadly adopted, you do actually need to get, you know, sort of the cost to a very, very reasonable point. So, you know, one of the things that we're working on today are things like, you know, if you think about, you know, there are all kinds of large language models that are used in AI. There's some who are, you know, the most advanced, the largest, which require, you know, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe even billions to train.

22:57But frankly, there are ways to, you know, really access, you know, sort of more fine-tuned models that, you know, don't require, you know, that kind of investment. Or if you think about, you know, how much it costs to ask a question to ChatGPT or one of your co-pilots these days, we call that an inference opportunity. We're absolutely looking at reducing the cost of that by factors over the next couple of years. So I don't believe that this is going to be an overall issue where the cost is prohibitive. I think it is an issue of you have to decide where your return on investment is and where are you going to see the largest productivity enhancements.

23:39And that is very much what we're driving as we look at advancing the technology going forward. So your industry seems very complex and the supply chain seems very complex. On top of that, you have the uncertainty of kind of political and trade issues. As I said, it's a sensitive industry. China recently said at least it was prohibiting AMD and Intel chips from government computers. Can you do anything to – how do you respond to that? Can you do anything to try to move the needle on sort of policy issues like this? Well, I would start with the notion that, look, every country has to do, you know, what they believe is in the best interests of their national interests.

24:22That being said, you know, the particular question that you have about China's policies around government procured processors, that actually wasn't new news. That was telegraphed actually late last year. And so, you know, it is something that, you know, again, we are, you know, we look at sort of the breadth of the market that we have. You know, we are a global company. We work in all markets. China is a large market for us. And so, you know, within that, as long as we can plan across the different markets, I don't see it as a significant factor in the business. I think. Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile with your summer price forecast.

25:03Now, unfortunately, we're seeing rising costs across the country with possibility that big wireless hates you 100%. Now, over here at Mint Mobile, we're seeing sunny skies and dropping prices. Every plan to just$15 a month. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three months,$90 for six months, or$180 for 12-month plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. New customer offer for initial plan term only. Greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms. The more important conversation is, we're very much about driving deep partnerships across the globe.

25:39And that's with both large companies as well as small companies, startups, and companies are very regionally focused. And we'll continue to drive deep partnerships across the world. As I mentioned at the start, you may well be the most prominent woman in the technology industry. How do you think the industry is dealing now in terms of gender equity? Well, that's very kind of you to say that, Adi. I appreciate that. Look, I consider myself extremely lucky to be where I am. This is kind of my dream job to be a part of an industry that is so important and essential to the world and be leading a company like AMD.

26:22You know, in tech, look, they're not enough women. I mean, you know, I think we can we can say that. it's one of those areas where we're consistently trying to drive more gender diversity, as well as just overall diversity of thought. And the reason for that is, frankly, is we want to build the best business, and we want to build the best products. And to do that, you do need diversity of experiences and thoughts. I'm a big believer in the best thing that we can do is give people opportunities. I was very lucky in my career and I got a chance to really experience many things early on in my career, which helped give me some great experiences.

27:05And so that's very much what I'm focused on doing is giving women sort of more exposure to the industry overall and then opportunities to shine and sort of demonstrate their capabilities going forward. So there's also the question of, I guess, age diversity. David Dawson, a viewer, asked, do you see any clear opportunities or gaps where new perspectives, and I think by that he means new graduates, young workers, will be beneficial, and let's say particularly in AI? Yeah, look, we are always looking for new talent. I mean, we've significantly grown as a company. When I first started as CEO, we were about 8 ,000 people.

27:49We're now about north of 25 ,000. So, you know, lots of, you know, lots of growth over the last 10 years. And I think the key for that is a diversity of perspective is super important. And that, you know, what I like to say, especially when we're looking for new graduates, you know, we're not like we don't view hiring somebody out of school as like job training. Like we're not looking for that exact software skill to plug into a software team. What we're looking for is people who are great thinkers, who are great problem solvers, who are here to build a career and here to learn a lot of different things.