AMD wants to be an AI-first company

A decade ago, 52 days after becoming CEO, Satya Nadella announced that Microsoft would become a “cloud-first” company. Last week, Jack Huynh, AMD’s Senior Vice President and GM of the Computing and Graphics Business Group said that AMD would need to become an AI-first company.

“The way to think about AI is that it’s not just do things a little bit faster, or a little bit better,” he said. “Our goal is to create net new experiences with AI, unlike anything that you’ve seen before.”

Hyunh cited one example of such a shift: OpenAI’s stunning text-to-video demos, as shown in the YouTube video below.

“I can see [Sora] disrupting the animation market,” he said. “There was a startup in the US that was just being funded for $700 million for animation. They paused the funding after they saw what Sora can do.”

He added that one of AMD’s core markets, gaming, could also be hugely affected. With AI built into its workflow, the time taken to develop new AAA titles might be drastically cut from over a decade to three to five years.

AMD shifts priorities from hardware to software

There’s another big change happening behind the scenes at AMD: a shift to software.

“We have actually tripled our software headcount in the past three years,” said Hyunh, “and we’re going even further”. He added: “Our goal in the next three to five years is to aggressively catch up [with rivals such as Intel and Nvidia]. So we’re over-investing in software now.”

His key point is that historically AMD has been more of a hardware-focused company. It would design great processors, then think about SDKs (software development kits) then the tool chains, then the software developers (such as Microsoft and Adobe).

Now, there is a shift in its strategy that puts software developers at the front of the queue. “We’re going to talk to the Adobes of the world, the Zooms, the Microsofts, and then build great SDKs, then the toolchains and then the silicon.”