AMD CEO Lisa Su Live on TBPN | Oliver Cameron, Mohammad Norouzi, Anjney Midha, Lisa Su

22:49So it depends on how you look at it.

22:51Anjney Midha:Yeah, I was asking from the lens of I think everyone on Earth now has now viewed an AI image, not known that it was AI and just assumed like, okay, looks like a normal image to me. and I think when you're talking about like if Pepsi is working on a campaign they don't need like as soon as it looks photo real they don't need something that's necessarily more real and so I just wonder what that means for the shape of Ideogram and where at some point like what the what the core competency will need to be for Ideogram to continue to evolve as a business if that makes sense Yeah, if you think, one is we still have issues with consistency.

23:35It's not at a level that a brand can use for their marketing, for their design. And we focus a lot on image generation and not as much on design generation, which is, okay, I have certain typography I want to translate across languages. I have my logo, it has to be 100 % accurate. With product photography, it has to be exactly correct. I can't buy a piece of clothing and then it doesn't match the picture. So when it comes to consistency, we're still lacking. But then part of the dream is to help with the design of future products. You know, the creative part of design requires a lot of understanding of the context.

24:25and then the brand DNA and putting them together to design the next generation of cars or design the next generation of shoes. And that's where we are focusing on and we are working with brands to help supercharge their design and production. To me, that is, I will just say,

24:46Anjney Midha:my most addictive AI experiences is designing products that don't exist yet. Just anything I could possibly imagine in my head. And then the process of like prompting and, you know, getting close and, you know, getting to maybe 95 % and then trying to get it again. You know, the last 5 % ends up taking, you know, 10 times more time than getting to the 95. Yeah. So related to that, what are enterprises looking for specifically from you like this month? Because we just went through the token maxing up and down where enterprises were just, you know, spraying tokens all over. You can use whatever model for anything.

25:28Check the weather with, you know, the best advanced model. But I imagine that your customers are concerned about cost, but also speed, quality, consistency. I know you're partnering with AMD, obviously. But walk me through a little bit of the problems that you're hearing from enterprises and what you're focused on solving in the short term. Yeah, one thing is data sovereignty. And obviously, when it comes to design, IP is extremely important. Lots of competitive industries that, okay, I can't let a competitor see the design of my future car. Oh, that's interesting. And imagine sending that over to the cloud.

26:02Yeah. And then that creates a lot of potential issues. Does that mean they want to run your models on-prem, or does that mean that they just want to know that you're hosting it in a certain secure way with a certain SLA around, we're not going to train on this? I would say both. Both? Okay. Both. And with the newest model that we released, it's actually a relatively compact model that's at the frontier, and it's open main. Wow. And that creates a new set of opportunities for us in terms of licensing and partnership where companies can host these models on-prem. Yeah. That brings down their costs, but also data sovereignty is really important.

26:38So on the design side, that's one thing they're hearing a lot. And then on the brand side, this is still consistency is an issue, but we think they're going to solve that in the next few months. Yeah. There's a big debate over open-weight models, geopolitical discussions, and one of the themes that's coming up is like American open-weight companies might be at a disadvantage if other countries' open weight models have less respect for intellectual property. And so I would think that you would be fighting with one arm tied behind your back, but based on your business clients, they might not want a model that infringes on IP because that could wind up getting them in trouble.

27:18So is it less of an issue for you or do you see like sort of the move fast and break things that may or may not be happening internationally actually being a headwind to your business. On the image side, it actually seems like American companies are doing really well. And we are at the frontier, so it's not as big of an issue. And the customer side, as long as we give them the protection they need, they are happy. But one other set of customers that we are seeing is actually generating data to train really sophisticated models for manufacturing problems, problems for really unique defense problems where you don't have a ton of training data.

28:01And these models are getting to the quality that they can generate images of defects, images of really rare scenarios that you can't find in a real world. And that's another example where, again, having it on-prem is important because they don't want to share that data with everyone else. Interesting. Interesting. Interesting. What has it been like working with AMD? We've talked about the software ecosystem around AMD. You're obviously, give me some like benchmarks on what you've actually seen from your performance. And then I want to know about the process to actually optimize one of your models for an AMD stack.

28:39Right. So it started with us testing some of the early models. It was MI300. and then we got to know about the roadmap. It's a really impressive roadmap with MI450 and the following ones, 455. So we started testing it. We got good results. And with AI agents, it's become so easy to, you know, give it the architecture and then get it to be optimized for the chip. And the AMD team has been really accommodating in terms of helping us out whenever some issues arise. And then we went live a few months ago with our 4.0 model. How much does the roadmap at AMD and other semiconductor companies affect how you're designing your product?

29:31Do you work backwards from this model? I know it's going to be able to do X, Y, and Z, hold this sort of memory, this flops, And then, okay, let's design the best model for that rack or that chip. Yeah, exactly. So we often customize the details of an architecture based on price, performance, latency, and then work backwards and strain the model when we get to the details of the architecture. There are certain changes that you can make that wouldn't have an impact on the quality of the model but would have an impact on the downstream performance and latency. So I think everybody does that in the frontier AI, that you kind of work backwards.

30:13But the problem is you also don't know too much about the future chips. Maybe that's why you've got to come here, meet the people, whisper, oh, really? That's what it's going to be? Okay, we'll work backwards from that. Or maybe you just have a proper deal and everything's above.

30:28Anjney Midha:We didn't get to this, but before you leave, what were you doing before this? Oh, I was at Google before this. Before that, I was a competitive programmer. then turned AI researcher, and then started Ideogram. At Google, I started Image Generation, this brand called Imagine, and I thought I can have a bigger impact. How much of the team is researchers at Ideogram now? It's about 50-50. 50-50. Yeah. We have a relatively small team. It's primarily engineering. That's really cool. And half of it focusing on the product and half of it is focusing on the model. Sounds like a dream. Well, congratulations on the progress.

31:03Thank you so much for coming on the show. Great to meet you. Great to have you. Great to meet you.

31:05Anjney Midha:Thanks for coming on. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. And I'll also tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Welcome. Welcome back. How are you doing? Great to see you. How are you doing? I love it. Just saying hi. Amazing. Thank you, man.

31:42Anjney Midha:What's happening? What's going on? What's up, boys? Good to see you again. Good to see you again. I think this third time. Oh, man, that jacket is so sharp. The greens are green. The TBPN green. That's the TBPN green. Okay. We'll coordinate. We'll connect you to our tailor. Do you have a brand color yet for AMP? We have the cream and the forest green. There you go. We actually have a forescreen coming. There you go. There's a new video model that just got announced this morning called Flux 3 that's training on the AMP Grid and it's from Black Forest Labs. Very cool. And they're up in the Black Forest near Freiburg in Germany.

32:19Anjney Midha:Wait, say AMP Grid again. The AMP Grid. That's a good sound effect for the AMP Grid. I like it. It's good branding. We'll get you the sound effect. We'll have our tailor talk to your tailor. We'll figure it all out. Yeah. Careful what you wish for, man. I would love the recommendation on that. But Black Force Labs, their color is forest green. Okay. Yeah, black forest. And I find it's a very soothing color. Yeah. I think there's some, like, neuropsychology around, like, green immediately calms you down. Yeah. You don't want caution yellow or, you know, high-vis orange. That's a little bit more aggressive.

32:54Well, there's some companies that make orange work. Yeah. Well, that's not a—Anthropic does not have a high-vis orange, although high-vis orange is maybe the one white space in branding. A16Z is orange. But that's not high-vis orange. That's not high-vis high-combinator. High-vis is like reflective orange. You know what I'm talking about. You see it on the road. That's hard, man. That is an ingress. That's hard to pull off as a brand. How are you thinking about the brand? Do you have a whole brand book yet? We're going with the vibes and the aura, man. There you go. I like it. As I've learned, just the vibes, generally the vibes are in the space of Frontier AI, which you guys have been an extraordinary voice on.

33:37Stuff changes every day. And so nobody's got any time to look at the first principles, the details, what's actually happening, which model is coming out, what's the difference between Fable 5 and Codex, blah, blah, blah. And so it's all aura-based decision-making right now because the brain just needs some easy heuristic to latch on.

33:56Anjney Midha:Yeah, I'm surprised we haven't seen a chief aura officer yet. That's the next chief brand officer. But when somebody does that, sell everything. It's probably too much. Once there's a name for the trend, it's all around. You make a good point, which is that if you have motion, it doesn't matter what your site looks like or what your logo looks like. People just attach their own feel, what they feel when they're interacting or to whatever you're putting out. Motion is underrated. There should be an AI company, Research in Motion. That would be good. Wasn't that Blackberry? Yeah. Anyway. I'm not mad.

34:34But I want to answer your question, which is what is the brand? The brand is what you stand for. Yeah. And we stand for output maxing. Okay. Right. I love it. There's just too much. What are we living through right now? We're living through the AI scaling era. Yeah. Bitter lesson holds. Yep. Let's scale, scale, scale. Yep. But the brain is naturally anchored to large numbers. Yeah. But nobody, like, 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?

35:07Yeah. And if you start measuring businesses or model capabilities or whatever through efficiency, the story is completely different than what just the headlines say. Yeah. A lot of people were token maxing. And I think we will look back on that era as really valuable exploration. It was actually totally worth it. But I like output maxing as the correct coinage as opposed to token maxing. I was trying to say token min maxing, token optimization. It's way better output maxing. I love it. It's like, what are we all here for? It's to try to grow GDP, not at all expenses. It'd be grow GDP in the compute optimal way.

35:43Yeah. Right? You cannot beat China at pure scaling. It's not going to happen. Industrial, like industrial scale coordination, where they go, you know what? Ban the H100s, H200s. All of you use Huawei and like get together and figure out how to scale with, even if you don't, we don't have the leading edge chips, put out Kimi K3. I don't care. I'm Xi Jinping. Like, I just want for us to be at the frontier. Yeah.

36:06Anjney Midha:And make, you know, 100 new nuclear plants. Build, build, build, baby. Like, you know, build, scale, whatever is required. Permitting. Who needs permitting? Just like, you know, they will just clear all the bottlenecks. They have been 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. Yeah. Meanwhile, they weren't even AI-pilled and they were planning on doing it anyways. They're like, yeah. So what do we have to do? We have to be smarter. Okay. We have to do output maxing. We've got to be more efficient.

36:36Only 15 % of every single tenant data center today in the United States is being utilized. Net flops utilization is less than 20 % in the United States. It is crazy. Is that just downtime from chips not being used at the right time, like misconfigurations, like the water supply is out or something? What's going on? 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. Chip's there, but it's just not getting work at the right time. Correct. Then within the chip, you only have like 15 % of the chip being utilized.

37:15That'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. That 85%, that's a national security crisis because that's what's keeping us from staying at the frontier. that's why we all keep complaining about oh Kimi K3 came out sure you can talk about distillation, distillation is definitely happening, however everybody who feels compute constrained 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 Visa 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 does that make sense?

38:02Anjney Midha:Yeah, it's sort of I mean, it's natural cycle. Any company that has grown really quickly or any industry that's grown really quickly, there just ends up being all this waste and misutilized resources and all this stuff. But the key, and I think what you're pushing for is like, even if you have this exponential growth, you can still try to be more, it's still important to be more efficient now so that we don't give up the advantages that we do have. I don't think we have a choice because the supply chain has backed up for like two years. So we're just not, like we at AMP, the AMP grid, We're procuring energy and new capacity for 2030.

38:36Wow. And there's not enough sites. Yeah. We're going to need nuclear. Are you spending time in nuclear companies? Yes. Actually, there's Seth right over there. Hi, Seth. Hi, Seth. How are you doing? Seth is a founder of a company called Mavrio that we've just invested in. I don't think. Good to meet you. Pop on the show. Pop on the show after this. Yeah, after he gets off. Well, yeah, we'll talk to you. Go over there. Talk to the team. Talk to me. It's a good time. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Talk to the team. Seth was at the DOE. Yeah. 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.

39:11Cool. And he's, thank you for your service, Seth. Okay. We'll give you a proper mic in a couple minutes. We got one more question.

39:18Anjney Midha:So walk us through the shape of your business right now. You have the fund. You're making new investments. Yep. You got a big allocation in, I think, obviously, every, you know, 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. They work. They're very interlinked. But how are you spending your time? Yeah. So we've got AmpFoundry, which is our venture capital firm and capital business. And we raise venture capital funds, You don't make a single chip there. We do not make any chips. Not yet. Not yet. Who knows?

39:54I wouldn't put it past you. At least that's a great partner. But our infrastructure arm, which we're actually spinning out pretty soon as an independent entity. Oh, interesting. We're not ready to announce the name yet, but you guys are going to love it. There we go. So that's for a follow-up. Great. It's building out about 2 gigawatts of capacity in the United States. Okay. And we're not making our own chips yet, but we're building out new sites. Yeah. There's new… Yeah, you're marshalling the capital, getting the right partners in place so everything can come together and the compute can come online.

40:29Yes. Speaking of 2 gigawatts, what can you tell us about this Anthropic AMD deal? I think it's 2 gigawatts,$5 billion investment. Oh, 6 gigawatts? Is that what it is? Up to 6. But I'm interested in, first, it just seems like another positive sign for the industry for Anthropic and AMD. Yeah. And it feels like we're also, I don't know, I haven't checked all the reactions, but it feels like, are we post-circular deal FUD? This seems like a very logical deal. You know, everyone's seen the ARR charts. Everything's growing. Businesses are using the tools. Like, it's a full ecosystem. The economy is growing.

41:05And so this type of partnership makes sense. But what do you tell them? How are you telling an earlier stage founder if they're trying to do a strategic deal? Well, well past the circular part. I mean, these were all concerns maybe two years ago. I agree. And so if you look at the value creation, when you have like Anthropic go from zero, literally when we started the business like 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, right? Now, the question is, how do you keep a healthy, independent ecosystem, all kinds of frontier capabilities churning?

41:49Sure. And the problem is that the core problem, one of many core bottlenecks, is that private credit markets do not see startups as investment-grade counterparties. So when they're trying to procure capacity, compute capacity like three, four years out, they just can't get, those contracts are not financed. 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?

42:32And I think what we've got to do in the United States is do a little bit of innovation to go, So 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, last time I checked, like 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. It's a focus culture. Like, talent dance teams that are focused get more done. Speaking of that, are large founding teams underrated?

43:16Are large founding teams underrated? Because there's a world where Anthropics, like, the exception to the rule, it's working for them, crazy. I mean, young company, but huge company. All the founders are still there. I think Anderil is another great example. Anderil is five and, you know, strong team. There was a while where the Silicon Valley wisdom was like two, maybe three. Right. Yeah. Most startup advice, as you guys know, is designed for the media outcome. It's fun for podcasts. Yeah. But the outlier businesses, they have large founding teams. They have family founding teams. Yeah. Like the Stripe Brothers.

43:55The conventional wisdom is don't start a company with personal and personal business. Yeah. And Dario and Daniel are brother and sister. The Collison's a brother and sister. Yeah. Black Forest Labs is 12 co-founders. They're all researchers. I had no idea. Yeah. So I think outliers do their own thing. Yeah. And that's the point. It's like whatever it takes to compete at the front end. And as long as you're super aligned and tight, I think that's what matters. Okay.

44:24Anjney Midha:Let's say you're talking. You do have a panel in a second. I wish we could hear longer. 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 getting into it. And 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.

45:08Anjney Midha:So where are you predicting or thinking about these next legs up after coding? So the gift that keeps giving still is reinforcement learning. Like ARL is just working. As a technology, it's so simple. it's like training a dog hey fighter go fetch you did right here's a treat and reward modeling used to be like this bespoke craft thing like two years ago now we're getting to the stage of industrial grade like repeatable reinforcement learning as a service and so I think 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.

46:03Because you guys know this. The capability is, there's a jagged frontier. Coding is clearly one area because of formal verification. With unit tests, the progress has been super fast. I think verification is, people just still haven't really internalized how generalizable this concept of the context feedback loop with verification built in is. And the algorithm is so simple. like RL just works, that wherever you can do like formal verification and RL, you're going to see crazy capabilities. So one example is Periodic Labs. It's one of our portfolio companies. They're trying to discover a room temperature superconductor.

46:41The pace of progress there has been extraordinary in the last like six months. They've got a 40 ,000 square foot facility in Manlo Park where you've got AI models that are predicting new materials, new candidates. and then you have robots synthesize the material and then 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, like from nature, like physics, you can do X-ray diffraction to test, does it have it or not? The feedback is, the signal is very clear and then you take that signal and pipe it back into RL like as many times as you need.

47:17And the capabilities ladder is extraordinary. 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. It's always a pleasure. I hear I'm just the opening act for Lisa, so she's next and have fun. 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've got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Welcome to the show. Introduce yourself.

47:48Anjney Midha:Have a C-bench. This morning, 335. There we go. Amazing. Can you lift this microphone up to your mouth? Thank you. And maybe move it over a little bit. There we go. The other way. Oh, yeah. Okay. Loud room. Loud room. Anyway, loud and clear, give us an introduction, yourself and the company. Hey, guys. My name is Seth Cohen. I am one of the co-founders of Maveria Inc. We are an AI infrastructure company, and we're looking to tackle some of the biggest problems in the space, and we're so thrilled to be working with Ange. yeah uh before this i was uh chief counsel of nuclear policy at the department of energy oh no way um the uh depending on who you ask either a senior advisor or the conservator of the nuclear regulatory commission yeah and an advisor at nasa oh cool um so i was the doge operative um one of two responsible for implementing the president's nuclear executive orders across the government very cool yeah all right what were you doing before that because that doesn't seem like the first job?

48:45Anjney Midha:Supreme Court and appellate litigation at a firm called Kirkland. Oh, cool. Heard of it. So the hat says nuclear. You introduced the company as AI infrastructure. Is that because AI is the hot trend and nuclear is just like the byproduct or are you a pure nuclear company? Walk me through where the Venn diagrams overlap between just AI infrastructure broadly, what you'll do and what you don't do, and then nuclear, what you do and don't do. Yeah, so one of the things that my Doge team leader, who's now my co-founder, Adam Blake, one of the two things that we, or three things that we first honed in on with nuclear were a set of bottlenecks that we thought were really going to be, we're going to prevent anything we had done, we did from actually taking effect.

49:32We needed to solve a couple of other things. And one of them was narrative, right? Nuclear is this incredibly, incredible technology that has so much potential for the world. and yet for 60 years it's faced this strange opposition including around nuclear waste and by the way if we if we can i'd really like to talk about nuclear waste it's my favorite thing

49:50Anjney Midha:in the world we love talking about nuclear waste so you're in the right place uh it's good to be among friends um but uh when so what we did with nuclear waste was actually we shifted the narrative and went from yucca mountain being the only place where you could put isle of a 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. And there are, I can't tell you the exact number, but it fits on two hands, the number of governors currently fighting to host the full back-end fuel cycle. So would that be one additional nuclear waste storage plan?

50:30Three. 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 our major metropolitan areas because we're going to re-industrialize around them. Yeah, yeah. Cities, I feel like you were 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? Well, so it's not, you know, to take a step back. Yeah.

50:53Anjney Midha:Is it too late to offer up my backyard? The ultimate UMB. No, I think what, so first off, when we talk about nuclear waste, that's really we we have this strange idea and it's probably the simpsons fault oh yeah um glowing yeah uh i have seen the blue glow of a spent fuel rod which is actually very very cool but there's no green goo yeah right so almost all all waste in the in the united states is medical stuff it's like gloves because some person went behind a wall and pressed an x-ray button oh interesting i didn't realize that that falls in there you think of it as like the pellets but it's really anything that touches that.

51:33So there needs to be a whole processing facility for that. That makes sense. Yeah, that's most. But the second is commercial spent fuel. Yeah. And just so we're 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.

51:51Anjney Midha:So why take it out if there's, if 90 % of the rod's potential is still there? So there are two main isotopes, one of which is getting split and used up. And so as that potential goes down, the ability to sustain a fission reaction also goes down. And then you accumulate byproduct material. So it's everything from plutonium to some really, really interesting stuff. So, but like before we get there, right, it's that, let's talk about like that remainder, right? So natural uranium is around 0.9 % of this really good isotope. most commercial fuel is three and a half to five. When you're done with a rod, it's around 0.7.

52:35We have 100 ,000 tons of this stuff. And this is from the lifetime of the commercial fleet. Yeah. Which, by the way, that fits in one football field. Yeah. Like 60 years of energy. But also should be repurposed in some way. Yeah. Yeah. There is four times more energy sitting on those pads outside of our reactors than Saudi Arabia has in its proven oil reserves. That's actually crazy. But that's not where the money is. Yeah. So where is the money? Where are you spending your time? How much time is in D.C.? Lobbying, like leveraging the old stuff? But close the loop here.

53:07Anjney Midha:So there's all this sort of like latent energy potential. I imagine you're doing something with it. Well, we got this program into motion, and I just wanted to talk about it because I'm so excited about what's going on here. And I think that we're on the cusp of a real energy revolution in the United States. But I think to understand why we're shifting, right, it's the weave.

53:35To understand why we're shifting here, you have to understand that what we really were successful at is getting people to see this thing that historically has been treated as a liability, as a real asset. An asset where governors are going out and staking their name on joining this. Utah and Tennessee both made their applications public, and they are awesome. That is a successful narrative shift. So that's bottleneck one to AI deployment is energy. So now we can back away from nuclear. We actually think that's moving in the right direction. So what's next? Well, right now, data centers are facing a tremendous amount of issues in the United States.

54:18Anjney Midha:A lot of it is public perception. Deeply popular with like 5 % of the country. Yeah. Less. On a good day. But these things are really, I mean, they're critical. These are critical national assets. And so we want to help shift the narrative in order to make AI deployment in the United States possible and make sure that we are able to roll out and remain competitive with China. I am dancing around what it is we exactly do. And 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. Yeah, thank you guys so much for having me on. It's been a pleasure.

54:54Great to meet you. Enjoy the rest of the conference. Great to meet you. And 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 us 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, of course, was some back and forth on the nature of that revenue.

55:33With SemiAnalysis sort of jokingly maybe posting, Google Cloud generates revenue primarily from the sale of TPU systems. The actual line that did change in the SEC filing that's drawing attention is that there's a line in there that says 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, of course, they have services as well. And so it's not that Google Cloud is fully pivoting to TPU sales exclusively. It is that they are also… But it's becoming meaningful. Yes, yes, yes. They've sold them to a number of labs, and they're seeing lots of process.

56:14Anjney Midha:And that was rewind a year. That was still a question. Yes, yes. We can go through. There's a number of different posts here. We can take you through Eric Sufert talking back and forth about. Sufenator? The Sufenator's 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. Just do it. So it's a bit of a longer post, but it all started with Sundar Pachai's news. He said, Q2 was an amazing quarter with our AI investments redefining what's possible across every part of our business.

56:59Alphabet revenue grew 24 % year over year, and Google Cloud accelerated to 82 % growth, which is insane. That means the foghorn 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. And at this point, the numbers have gotten so big on tokens per minute, tokens per month, that it's very hard to keep in sync with what's actually impressive until you actually see a full chart. But that's driven by their workhorse Flash model, which makes sense. 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.

57:42So 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. A little bit of fear, uncertainty, doubt. Search volumes are declining as legacy searches 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 and explicitly do not approve Google to charge them for.

58:19He gives a few examples. He's going back and forth saying that this is short-term optimization. But the suvenator comes in. He says, unfortunately, every claim made in this viral thread is either false or mixed, characterizes Google's policy. One, search volumes are declining as legacy search is being increasingly cannibalized by non-monetized LLM queries. Google stated in its Q2 earnings that search usage hit an all-time high during the World Cup this year. It also stated in Q1 earnings that search queries reached an all-time high that quarter. ads and AI overviews, monetized in parity with those in legacy search, and Google's search revenue increased by 19 % in Q1 and 17 % in Q2.

59:00So a little deceleration, but still growing. 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 previously had precise keyword targeting settings that allowed advertisers to pick individual search phrases to bid on, there's a different thing. But Souvenator goes back and forth and adds some more context to the Google earnings that people are digging into, and we can dig into more later this week. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider user favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.

59:43Over in the Wall Street Journal, there's a couple articles. Alphabet rides cloud business. Revenue jumps 24%, but data center outlays push cash flow into the red. I think it was the first quarter for negative cash flow, but this has been telegraphed for a long time. They're investing in the AI boom. Not a surprise. And there's been talks from all the hyperscalers around debt issuances, equity issuances, all different things to fund the AI build-out. So Google parent company Alphabet posted 24 % revenue growth year over year in the second quarter, fueled by its booming cloud business, but concern over the company's heavy spending on AI infrastructure damped investors' enthusiasm.

1:00:21Alphabet sales came in at$119.8 billion, exceeding analyst expectations. Its cloud business brought in$24.8 billion, and its search business generated$63 billion. Net income was$112 billion for the April-June period, also ahead of analyst expectations, So they beat, primarily driven by its gains in other companies' stocks that Alphabet owns. They own, I think, almost$100 billion of SpaceX. I'm not sure about the current valuation. But in other AI news in the Wall Street Journal, two big AI infrastructure stories. You have Lisa Su herself right here. AMD Anthropics signed AI gear deal. We talked to Ajne a little bit about that.

1:01:09OpenAI boosts cloud spend to$750 billion. New projects and Georgia data center will be part of efforts to increase capacity. OpenAI is scaling up its data center ambitions and its budget for spending on them. The artificial intelligence company has raised its projected spending on computing power to around$750 billion through 2030, up from a projection of roughly$600 billion. It's a huge number, obviously. A lot of discussion about that. But 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 the progress and the scaling law, of course, because we are in the scaling era.

1:01:51Anjney Midha:Serious momentum. Yeah, the scaling, the increase reflects new agreements with cloud computing providers as OpenAI races to lock up the enormous amounts of computing capacity it needs to develop and run its AI models. opening spending on cloud computing has become a central focus of chief executive sam altman's leadership team and has been a source of tension between him um the company said wednesday would invest 20 billion in uh to kick off a data center called project camilla in effingham county georgia so that's new news also nvidia has a supplier that's ever been to georgia yes i've been to atlanta it's a great town gotta visit you've never been maybe on a layover it's like la i don't think i've been outside it's like los angeles you're in the car for half an hour driving in traffic to get everywhere everywhere but it's uh it's a really nice city uh liang when feng deep seek had an investor call i i don't have context on how this uh actually came up because they're they're a hedge fund and they have deep seek still a private they're raising outside capital now they're raising outside capital yeah so this was probably a part of that road show yeah I think at a certain point he needs to raise enough money that you got to just get on Zoom and sell the dream.

1:03:05But he was grinding for four hours, just monologuing for four. I don't know if he was monologuing for all four, but it is sort of a long call. That's bullish, though.

1:03:14Anjney Midha:It is. Because if you can go and basically do a Joe Rogan podcast episode, just monologuing. You think that's what he's doing? 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. And it's like it gets interesting on Joe Rogan because after an hour, people go off script. Yeah. 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 Zephyr shared. He's over at Satrini. Their inference margins are around 85 % strong. They only had around 20 ,000 hopper equivalents until May.

1:03:54Anjney Midha:still sort of I can see how they would say that. That doesn't mean that 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, is enough to turn the company cash flow positive, and they have a GPU payback period of 10 months, and their hardware is depreciated over three to five years. So looking quite good over the pond. He also shared a lot of philosophy that felt sort of derivative of Western AI lab leaders thought. I mean, he was focused on, you know, some of the same language around. We don't want to monitor.

1:04:38We don't want to optimize for pure profit. We're on the path to AGI first. It's something that you've heard from a lot of lab leaders. He did say that he's very focused and he wouldn't be doing world models or image generation or video generation or even a chat app. He said he doesn't want to be the next Alibaba, is purely focused on the path to AGI, sort of taking this focused approach. And so we'll see. They've sort of been out of the game with Moonshot sort of coming from behind with K3 and a lot of hype there. And then GLM, of course, as well. So it'll be interesting to see what he has up his sleeve on the back of this investor call that everyone's paying attention to.

1:05:18Before 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.

1:05:33Anjney Midha:Gong moment. Cognition is acquiring interaction, the makers of Poke. Huge. That's a crazy deal. I think Poke has been an acquisition target or been talked about as an acquisition target for a long time now. They've just 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 that they'd get picked up by a big consumer company, maybe an Apple. Weren't people seeing Apple? An Apple would have been amazing. Having the Poke team working on Siri would be quite cool. Could have seen them going to OpenAI or really even an Amazon.

1:06:12Anjney Midha:So a little bit unexpected here, but not surprised that Scott saw potential in the team. And I'm very interested to see how these businesses end up actually merging. Will they keep Poke around? Will it be just sort of folded into cognition? But either way, very excited to see what they build. 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 a chance to read through, but it's fun because it tells the story of a young person who basically started, literally listened to a podcast and started a search fund and made, I guess, millions of dollars.

1:07:01Did the meme? Yeah, did the meme. This shortcut to private equity riches is minting young millionaires. And I saw Sal Khan from Khan Academy talking about something sort of adjacent to this because Khan Academy, of course, sort of open source education. You can basically learn everything that you learn in college from Khan Academy just watching videos and doing their online open coursework. I believe it's a nonprofit.

1:07:28Anjney Midha:It's still crazy that Khan Academy exists and plenty of people still turn it down. Yes. Oh, they do. They do. So, yeah, this person didn't, though, basically. Go-getters are backing to buy up HVAC 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 Akhil was a homeless college dropout with a single focus, figuring out how to get rich. sleeping in WeWorks on the subway in an airport waiting areas. Ackill watched videos, listened to podcasts. Let's give it up for some podcasts and poured over personal finance books.

1:08:17He needed to own a business, he decided. But how do you do it with no money? Then Ackill 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, Ackill, now 37, has bought two multimillion-dollar companies. He has spent each month of the past three years living in a different country. So he's doing the nomad lifestyle. He's running HVAC companies? I guess. We'll get into it. He's now worth seven figures. Ackill is part of a growing wave of people looking for a shortcut to private equity riches armed with grit and determination.

1:08:54They 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-sized businesses. Financing such deals is 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 who cobble together money from friends, family offices, private equity funds, and SBA-licensed small business investment companies.

1:09:33And 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 pay.

1:09:41Anjney Midha:Especially if 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 Sal Khan 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,$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 buying an ice cream store. We're going to lever something up.

1:10:27That's$200 ,000 of net income.

1:10:30Anjney Midha:Yeah. And we're going to lever it up. Yeah. And the cash flow is going to pay your salary. So you're going to have a job 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. I don't know if it'll take off. It feels like alpha school adjacent. But when the time comes, maybe we can get all the kids and say, I mean, it's hard to predict what the world would be like in 15 years or 20 years if you're just having kids now.

1:11:09But 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. For sure. Anyway, I view these guys as the homesteaders of the Wild West, said Albrecht, who previously represented a big private equity firm and a law firm, Gibson 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 desire to avoid grunt work that ends up lining the pockets of others.

1:11:53Also 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.

1:12:2577 search funds, 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.

1:12:37Anjney Midha:There's no way that that's accurate. Yeah, maybe there's 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. But that is historically high, although down from the 2023 peak of 101, there was 101 search funds founded in 2023. Meanwhile, the number of firms doing deals as independent sponsors without a fund has roughly doubled to 1 ,400. So there's a whole bunch of different stuff going on. There's other stories in here.

1:13:17Caroline Sabat bought a Boston-area plumbing business in 2025 and merged it with a smaller one her and her husband had started. They got joint degrees from Harvard's business and government schools after nearly 10 years in the U.S. 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 at Caroline, now 35, who managed a crew of nine as a flight naval officer.

1:13:51It 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 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 that working. It was very subscale. Yeah. Working for someone younger than me and having to live life one PowerPoint slide at a time was torture, he said.

1:14:29He quit his consulting job. Anyway, there's another interesting Google news. Google did a, they released this massive, massive study. I think it's like 100 pages about the impact of AI. And they have a very, very unique data set, obviously, because Google is vended, like the AI is vended into Google Search and all the different tools and the API. And they say AI is helping workers not replace 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.

1:15:07Anjney Midha:If you use your own eyes and ears instead of reading. Like thought pieces or sci-fi or something. Oh, yeah, that too. Yeah. You know. It's all over here. Then you know. 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.

1:15:48It 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 jobs. Google economist Scott Strand, one of the researchers, the stakes are high for Google parent alphabet. bet 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 build-out of data centers across the country. Some large corporations that have laid off employees, this was your point, in the past year have said that they were able to downsize because of AI, yet the U.S.

1:16:25unemployment rate overall remains relatively low.

1:16:31And 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 yours? Are you going full bandana for the interview? Is that what you're thinking? I don't know. Anyway, I think we are...

1:17:11Anjney Midha:You've 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 i mean i don't know john did you know cowboys that we landed on the moon before we put wheels on luggage that's impossible that's what they're saying john we put a man on the moon before anyone put wheels on suitcases how is that possible no one thought about 1970 this is an assume to let people were just like that 1970 was the first time that we thought, why don't we put little wheels? It would be great to put those things from the car on my luggage if only we could miniaturize the technology.

1:17:54Anjney Midha:If it can be done, we should do it. Yeah. But if no one's done it before, it might be impossible. It's sort of a moonshot project. That is actually a crazy, crazy statistic. I mean, that's like the, what, sharks are older than trees. Isn't that a thing? I think sharks have existed in the ocean before trees or something. That's one of those like 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. But 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.

1:18:31We 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 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 that you were asking, Ajne, about what is the next leg up?

1:19:09What is the next thing that causes another order of magnitude boom in token consumption, basically, or like revenue or whatever metric you want to measure the AI boom through? And there are just like diffusion elements, right, where, you know, the number of people that are using coding agents is still small. and you could just see diffusion that way. But there is...

1:19:36Anjney Midha:Yeah, I think there's some data, US households that pay for AI products is still well below two digits, somewhere around 5%. Yeah, I do think that... Part of that is like, there's just a lot of households that are not going to pay for AI, at least directly. There is just the, like going back to the meter chart, which has 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 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.

1:20:24Maybe the system needs to get back and forth with you, But people just aren't – we're still very, 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, in one-hour increments.

1:20:42Anjney Midha:Well, you know who's optimistic about AI, John? Who? Friend of the show, Mark Zuckerberg. Oh, yeah? Mark has launched a new campaign that is focused on AI optimism. in Axios Meta CEO 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. I thought it was a cool video.

1:21:24I liked it. It's interesting to imagine watching it not as a fan of social media, though, because it's leaning a lot on, like, 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, and 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 fully on board. So I don't know how it will be received.

1:21:52Anjney Midha:Yeah, I don't know how it's going to land. It's definitely the correct angle. The opposite is worse. Clearly, you want to be optimistic. And there's a lot of data to show. I'm really glad that he's not memetically going down the fear-based path. Oh, my God. Yes. That would be very, very rough. This is working for some players. Anyway, so we'll see how it lands. what else is going on paramount is moving into micro dramas this is the moment you've been waiting for you love dramatic movies i don't know can i interest you in some micro dramas have you tried any of the i watched the true shorts yeah yeah yeah i watched a true crime one And I felt like I was actually fine with the AI video and voiceover element of it.

1:22:45What I felt was missing was when you're tracking a true crime story and you turn on a podcast about that true crime, whatever it was, 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 that I watched at least was very much like the Wikipedia level summary or like the headlines just condensed. And it was too generic and it wasn't giving me enough novelty and like new facts.

1:23:28so even though like the video wasn't quite there it was obviously AI it wasn't it wasn't super visually striking the audio was sort of you know 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 gonna get me there's something about going to the theater it's an experience it's like it's the anti-brainer what if what if a theater were to turn the screen sideways they've done that they've done that there's there's somebody in brooklyn i think put together like a whole like we're gonna watch instagram reels together or like tiktok it's like short form film festival or something 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 like where's my premiere and like maybe there should be a premiere for the next season of Subway Takes, whenever that happens.

1:24:26I 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 faked this with, what are you laughing at?

1:24:36Anjney Midha: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. Oh, no. You can imagine it gets pretty clickbaity in there. You can definitely imagine that. Yeah, this doesn't look, this looks like if Apple knew that this was on there, they might ask them to take it down. 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. I thought this screenshot from Bar Epsilon was very funny, where it was just I couldn't solve the Riemann hypothesis.

1:25:22I couldn't solve the Hodge conjecture. I couldn't solve P versus NP. I couldn't solve Navier strokes. It's just every really, really challenging Millennium Prize or unsolvable math problem. We've been working on our own conjectures. We're creating because of all the conjectures are solved.

1:25:40Anjney Midha:We actually built it out, I think it was 2009. Yeah, I remember back in college. We've been letting it sit because we just didn't have the technology. We didn't have the capability. 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 at it. Speaking of conjecture, there's a lot of conjecture about what OpenAI is releasing today. Tebow said, unbelievably excited for what's coming together. Tomorrow is feeling codexy. people are speculating that it might be a cerebrous a faster version of soul turbo mode it is chat GPT voice is now in the desktop app control your computer and direct multiple agents running in chat GPT work or codex using just your voice it's powered by GPT live so it can speak listen and coordinate work in the app at the same time and then also health is rolling out to US users everywhere health in chat GPT you can securely connect Apple health and supported medical records to understand your information context.

1:26:38What about Eight Sleep? Ooh, got to get it on there for sure. 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.

1:27:03Anjney Midha:So, Shiel Monat is sharing some interesting nuggets in an information article on Stripe, which we will be getting to next episode. Critical infrastructure for the AI era, unlock seamless real-time experiences, a new value with Cisco. And we have Lisa Su joining us in just a minute. We're about to bring her onto the show. And thank you for tuning in. Thank you for everyone who makes the show possible. This is the moment we've all been waiting for. It is. It is. Thank you to Ramp for making it possible. Time is money. Say both. Welcome to the show, Lisa. Thank you so much for coming on. We appreciate you being here on such a busy day.

1:27:48Thank 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? It is a fantastic day. Yes. What have been the highlights? Well, you know, it's wonderful to see just everyone, you know, all of our community here. So customers, partners, certainly a lot of developers here. And we're seeing a lot of excitement. Take us back to 2014. How is 2026 different?

1:28:22Anjney Midha:Just a little bit 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? Like, what is your life like as CEO of AMD right now? Well, I have to say, when I think about this entire arc of 2014 until now, the thing that has been perhaps most interesting to me, it's like the world's like a different place. Like every year, like every two years, you see the tech trends are different. You see the customer, you know, sort of needs are different. You see the marketplace changing.

1:29:01And that's what just kept it really exciting for me because it's one of those things where, like, 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, I think the rate and pace of change is actually much, much faster. I mean, semiconductors has always been a fast-paced environment. But the rate and pace of change of the adoption curve of AI and then how the technology is changing and then, frankly, how the ecosystem is changing has us constantly on the, hey, we've got to go faster. I mean, that's the primary thing is we have, you know, we're in a business where you make decisions, you know, three to five years in advance on your technology roadmaps.

1:29:42And you realize, man, we can even go faster. And that's what the market wants.

1:29:48Anjney Midha:And 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. I mean, people ask me that from time to time. And the reason I view it as a good thing is, look, 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. And so it is not where the components under covers. We're actually helping drive sort of how technology is being consumed. And so I think that's the difference, right?

1:30:29It's much more front and center versus just something that only techies know about. 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 then 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 at AMD? Well, I think I'd take a step back and say, hey, why do I wake up every day? What are people at AMD really excited about? And we're really excited about putting great tech out there.

1:31:09And I'm not kidding. Our mantra, our number one mantra is build great products. And 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. And you think about launching Helios. You think about launching Venice. You think about 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 we want to be really the best in the industry. I mean, our goal is to drive the future of technology. And, you know, we do it the AMD way.

1:31:49And what does the AMD way mean? We do it in partnership. We do it in color operation. We believe in open ecosystems. We believe in using the best technology for each workload. You know, so this idea that, you know, one company is going to have the killer chip. I don't think that's the world we're in today. Was that always the AMD way?

1:32:12Anjney Midha:We had Travis Kalanick on the show yesterday, and he started off saying the Uber way, and then he stopped himself and he said, well, the Travis way. He laid out sort of his approach. Was this approach something that you feel like the company had in 2014, or was that these sort of pillars, things that you felt like were important going forward and you've added some over time? 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.

1:32:58I think the last 10 plus years, you know, hopefully what, you know, 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, you know, brings together the ecosystem. And, you know, I have to say everything about tech, like I was so happy to see, you know, to have, you know, Tom Brown of Anthropic with us, you know, Santosh of Meta, Sachin of OpenAI, you know, Jeremy at AT &T, G2 was here.

1:33:34And what you kind of get from all of that is, you know, partnership is not just a word. Like partnership is kind of our foundation. And I'm a big believer in one plus one is greater than three. So, you know, obviously we have to have great tech, but we also have to be able to, kind of see the future through the broad lens. And the way you do that is having great partners along the way. So that's very much, I think, the foundation of today's AMD culture.

1:34:03Anjney Midha: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? Well, I'm super excited to be able to talk about it. You know, we've been, I kid you not, we have very much wanted Anthropic on AMD for a long time. And we just had to find the right intersection point, the right intersection point of our technology with, you know, where they are. I mean, you know, Claude has been incredibly, incredibly successful. And probably the highlight for me was, I think he told that story on stage about the MI-355.

1:34:41And that's a very true story. It's a very true story.

1:34:44Anjney Midha:And you've been busy today, but that's what the Internet's talking about. Is that right? Okay. I haven't seen that. I can tell you, 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, well, 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. That's incredible. So I think he told you the story. But it's just a lot about how the ecosystem has evolved over time, right?

1:35:19I'm a big, big believer in AI's 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. Like you heard Sachin say, like, 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.

1:36:11Yeah, you mentioned not focusing on just, like, 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? Well, I think the interesting thing is every so often you hear, like, this is the killer chip. Yeah. Right? You guys have heard, like, GPUs. You see that on the model side, too.

1:36:43Anjney Midha:GPUs are going to take over the world. Yeah. Like, CPUs are dead. We're going to move every single workload over. And the world just doesn't work like that. And so our thought process has always been, you know, people asked me very early on, hey, Lisa, why don't you just focus? Like, you decide, like, whether it's CPUs or GPUs. Why do you need both? And, you know, I think about each one of these questions deeply. And, you know, we fundamentally believe that there is no one size fits all. Like the world is a heterogeneous world. Like you are different than I am. We have different needs. We have different workloads.

1:37:20Our businesses are different. You're going to need different compute. And I think the portfolio that we have, you know, CPUs, GPUs, we acquired Xilinx. So we brought the physical AI component in there. We have a rich, you know, PC ecosystem, I think allows you to truly pick the right compute. Now, it's a little bit harder, right? We have a tremendous number of R &D priorities, but I think we've done it in a very, you know, kind of, I want to say smart way in the sense that each part of our product portfolio builds on each other. Like we talk about, you know, chiplets being a big thing that we do.

1:38:02We do that across the portfolio. So we do that across our CPU portfolio, our GPU portfolio. and it just is an example of how we're able to leverage getting the right compute for the right workload. 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.

1:38:52How is that going to evolve? I think it is extremely important, like you said, because people access technology in different ways. Not everyone is going to a big cloud instance to experience AI. And so the fact that we do have a consumer roadmap, a prosumer roadmap, our Ryzen, our Radeon, frankly, we're putting a lot more emphasis on some of these other ways to access AI. So 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. So our Ryzen AI Max portfolio, I think physical AI is another place where we just launch these small robotics form factors so that people can experiment with it.

1:39:49So I do think it's quite important to have, let's call it, low barrier of entry. Like, I want people to experience AMD and have a wonderful experience. And they may end up being in the largest frontier model companies. Or, frankly, the amount of startups that are doing just amazing technology is fantastic. And we want to support those as well.

1:40:15Anjney Midha:How do you think about long-shot 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 at least thought of it. And 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? 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.

1:41:02So chiplets, networking, optimization CPU and GPU, putting that together in Helios. I mean, that's really unfolded over the last three or four years. And today, we're thinking about what's beyond the roadmap. And I think both are very important. So 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, hey, 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?

1:41:46But 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.

1:41:59Anjney Midha:And now it's easy. So everyone's doing it. It is not easy. I'm joking. It is not easy, but it's appreciated. yeah it's appreciated yeah and and part and part of this like software singularity that it that it feels like in some ways we're already in vcs are just they feel like more confident underwriting risk yeah uh on the hardware side yeah i don't i don't know that i would feel more or less but i would definitely say that there's been a change you know people that didn't necessarily have the patience for hardware before because it's a long arc on hardware and now i think there's an appreciation that fundamentally, you know, hardware, you know, silicon software systems, when you optimize together, you're going to get a significantly better result.

1:42:46So 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, quite open to new ideas. You know, we've gotten to the place where I'm really happy with the acquisitions that we've done. We've actually brought in some incredibly talented individuals who have had a huge, huge impact on our AI roadmap. Certainly, I think a lot of people know Anush out there, so one of our acquisitions who is doing an incredible job trying to make sure that everyone who wants to use Rock 'em is going to get our support. But a number, our Pensando acquisition, our Xilinx acquisition, our ZT acquisition, all of these were to kind of bring the components in that help us build the full system solution.

1:43:33Well, we know you're busy. Thank you so much. We have a gong here. We'd love for you to hit it on this massive day. Do I get to do this? Please. As hard as you want.

1:43:43Anjney Midha:There we go. Right here. Thank you so much. And speaking of hardware companies, they're hard, but we have an AMD-powered chromatic from Mod Retro, the M64. You want to sign right here next to AMD. Perfect. There we go. Is this one of yours? It's Dylan's over there. Dylan. All right. It's going in a museum. We're good friends of the team over there. We love consumer hardware and all these things. So thank you for powering it. Thank you for coming on. And thank you for coming on the show. And congratulations on everything. Thanks for having us. Thanks. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great day. And that's our show, folks.

1:44:20Thank you so much for tuning in to TBPN Live from AMD. We are traveling tomorrow. We'll be back on Monday, 11 a.m. Pacific. Thank you to the team here who flew up. and thank you to everyone at AMD for making this possible. We really appreciate you. We're dialing in these IRL shows. Yeah, we're getting there one step at a time.

1:44:41Anjney Midha:The team makes it look easy. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com, and we will see you on Monday, 11 a.m. sharp, for another one. Goodbye. Cheers.