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

(03:31) - Oliver Cameron, co-founder and CEO of Odyssey, discusses the development of foundational world models—AI systems capable of understanding physics, causality, and human behavior—to enhance various industries, including robotics, gaming, and autonomous vehicles. He highlights the limitations of current AI systems, which are often narrowly trained, and advocates for more generalized models that can be fine-tuned for specific tasks. Cameron also emphasizes the importance of diverse data sources in training these models to ensure robustness and adaptability across different applications. (21:09) - Mohammad Norouzi, CEO and co-founder of Ideogram, discusses the company's mission to enhance creativity through generative AI, focusing on design and marketing applications. He highlights the challenges of achieving consistency in AI-generated images, particularly for brand marketing and product design, and emphasizes the importance of data sovereignty for enterprises, noting that Ideogram's compact, open-weight models can be hosted on-premises to address these concerns. Norouzi also mentions Ideogram's collaboration with AMD to optimize their models for AMD's hardware, tailoring model architectures to balance price, performance, and latency. (31:42) - Anjney Midha is the founder of AMP PBC, an AI infrastructure startup, and a former general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. In the transcript, he discusses the importance of "output maxing" in AI development, emphasizing the need for efficient utilization of computational resources to maintain a competitive edge. He highlights that only 15% of data center capacity in the U. S. is utilized, calling this underutilization a national security concern, and advocates for smarter, more efficient use of existing infrastructure to stay at the forefront of AI advancements. (55:12) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:27:52) - Lisa Su, born in Taiwan and raised in the U. S., is the chair and CEO of AMD, renowned for revitalizing the company since 2014. In the conversation, she highlights the rapid evolution of AI, emphasizing the need for AMD to accelerate its technology roadmaps to meet market demands. Su also underscores AMD's commitment to building great products through collaboration and open ecosystems, reflecting the company's culture of partnership and innovation. TBPN is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP and today's Thursday, July 23rd, 2026. Jordy is wearing a bandana. What corporate logo is on that bandana?

• 0:10Jordi Hays?

  TVP and collab here.

• 0:12John Coogan?

  With AMD Advanced Micro Devices. Yeah, beautiful. Thank you to the team for hosting us. Thank you to the AMD team for having us here at AMD. Advancing AI, we're on the road in SF today. We have a bunch of great guests for you. Lisa Su's joining in about 90 minutes. But let's you take you through a little bit of the news of what AMD is announcing, what's happening today. So Lisa, of course, will be joining us at 1:30 PM. We have Oliver Cameron from Odyssey, Mohammed from Ideogram and Ajne from AMP coming back to the show for round two. Round two or round three, we've probably talked to him a few times. It might be the third time. Advancing AI is AMD's biggest AI event of the year where it reveals new chips, software partnerships,

• 0:55John Coogan?

  and how it plans to compete with Nvidia, according to Jackson Ford's newsletter.

• 0:59Jordi Hays?

  We just found this out this morning. AMD is actually powering the new mod retro device.

• 1:04John Coogan?

  M64.

• 1:05Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 1:06John Coogan?

  It's very, yeah.

• 1:07Jordi Hays?

  A crossover Palmer, Lisa.

• 1:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, so we're going to be spending all 30 minutes of our time with Lisa Su on gaming specifically.

• 1:14Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 1:14John Coogan?

  How is, how are they going to bring?

• 1:16Jordi Hays?

  And suits.

• 1:16John Coogan?

  And suits, yes.

• 1:17Jordi Hays?

  And suits.

• 1:18John Coogan?

  Wear a fantastic suit collection.

• 1:19Jordi Hays?

  Got a fantastic suit on today.

• 1:21John Coogan?

  So the three key stories that people are focused on out of AMD advancing AI are AMD unveils Helios, the new rack scale AI system powered by the MI450 accelerator. We'll talk to Lisa about that. Also, a new partnership with a frontier lab, AMD and Anthropic are partnering to deploy up to 2 gigawatts of AMD Instinct MI450s.

• 1:44Jordi Hays?

  Size gong.

• 1:45John Coogan?

  Size gong, $5 billion deal and a whole bunch of claw, a whole bunch of collaboration across compute and the software stack. The big question around the software ecosystem around AMD is always a hot topic. I'm sure there's a ton of developments there.

• 2:01Jordi Hays?

  And on stage, just a little bit ago, they were talking about how Anthropic's own models are effectively speeding up their ability to ramp up new hardware.

• 2:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:10Jordi Hays?

  Which is something that has been talked about for years now, some questions around.

• 2:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17Jordi Hays?

  The coup de moat, right? If you assume that making great software will just get easier and easier. That that's been a big question.

• 2:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26Jordi Hays?

  And they're starting to see real movement there.

• 2:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, but also a lot of that speed up requires actual deep partnership like this, because there are some closed source packages that you might need to, you might need to work on. This is the old George Hots interaction.

• 2:40Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:41John Coogan?

  Talking about little bugs that he was frustrated with, wound up working with AMD developer team, who we've talked to on the team on the show. Fantastic outcome there, but interesting to see that flywheel just get tighter and tighter and tighter. And I expect it will also AMD is expanding its partnership with Cerebras, teaming up on AI inference. We love the team over at Cerebras. They introduced a powerful disaggregated inference solution, pairing the right engine to each phase of the inference pipeline. This is what agentic AI has been waiting for, the fastest production inference at massive scale. So excited to talk about that as well. But our first guest is here, Oliver Cameron from Odyssey. I have a whole bunch of fun backstory. You can come on down.

• 3:25Jordi Hays?

  Here he is.

• 3:26John Coogan?

  I first met Oliver almost five years ago. You were working at Cruise doing easy stuff, self-driving cars. And you took a ton of time to talk to me and walk me through exactly how you were thinking about self-driving. You explained a lot of different stuff to me about what's being done in machine learning, what's being done with C++. Very excited to have you back on the show. How are things going?

• 3:49Speaker 02

  Things are going great. Thank you so much for having me.

• 3:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  Great to have you.

• 3:52John Coogan?

  Congratulations on the massive progress. Last round was what 300 something billion, a million, a million raised? It's going to be billion next week.

• 4:00Jordi Hays?

  Billion.

• 4:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  310 million.

• 4:02John Coogan?

  310 million.

• 4:03Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 4:03John Coogan?

  Fantastic. And, and where is the product right now? Like, how are you describing how much is in the research phase? How much are you ready to deploy this with early adopters? How are you thinking about that?

• 4:15Speaker 02

  We are in the GPT two phase of world models.

• 4:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:18Speaker 02

  And what we're building is foundational world models. The idea being that this is a technology that can be useful and applicable to tons of different industries, whether that's, for example, robotics or science or gaming or driverless cars.

• 4:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  And so we've been on this journey now for three years.

• 4:34John Coogan?

  Is there still a market in self-driving cars? Because it feels like the world models, a lot of that research was done at Cruise and Waymo and Tesla. And that was where I was first introduced to them. I was like, oh, they built a video game version of San Francisco. And of course they're training it there. Is there a world where you wind up powering future self-driving initiatives and autonomy initiatives?

• 4:55Speaker 02

  I think so. I think world models can power all sorts of virtual and physical systems. The virtual systems might be gaming, for example, might be education. And then the physical systems will be driverless cars, robotics, drones, all that sort of stuff.

• 5:09John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  What I believe is that driverless cars today and lots of automated systems look very much like NLP systems in the 2010s. They are these very complex, very hand tuned systems. They're intelligent, but they're intelligent in sort of isolated ways.

• 5:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  And that those systems hold back what these technologies can do. And so I think you can replace these very hand tuned driverless car systems with a single world model that has this very deep understanding of physics, of cause and effect, of human behaviors, and just lightly tune that world model to the task of driving.

• 5:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  What we're seeing early evidence of is that you can indeed do that. You can take these very big general world models, tune them with just a few hours of experience, and then the car drives itself. Pretty cool.

• 5:49Jordi Hays?

  So what are, what are your interactions and relationships, partnerships look like with various types of robotics companies? So think of like, if someone's building a humanoid, or we were talking to Travis Kalanick yesterday doing autonomy and mining. So like, what does an Odyssey relationship look like with those companies today?

• 6:06Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So we very much believe that the robot companies are customers of us. We provide that base intelligence. They then have their robot, their embodiment, their task, and they can take that base intelligence and tune their model to make that task amazing. What we see earlier evidence of is that using a world model versus a vision language action model, the number of examples you need to show the world model is dramatically less than a vision language action model, which means it's just much more adaptable to the world.

• 6:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 6:33Speaker 02

  Than a vision language action model.

• 6:35Jordi Hays?

  Makes sense.

• 6:36John Coogan?

  Talk about data right now. A lot of these world model systems, it feels like they were bootstrapped on Unreal Engine systems or just video game systems generally. I imagine that the amount of data that's getting poured in the pot and mixed together is huge at this point. But what are some of like the power law data sources generally that are useful in building world models?

• 6:57Speaker 02

  Yes. So I, I'll get to the point eventually, I promise.

• 7:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, take your time.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  So what I observed in driverless cars.

• 7:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  And we've seen in robotics is that you typically train those systems on very narrow data distributions, right? So you're a driverless car company, you collect lots of data from the road.

• 7:13John Coogan?

  Dash cams, basically.

• 7:14Speaker 02

  Dash cams.

• 7:15John Coogan?

  But also cameras around the car.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 7:18John Coogan?

  We've all seen the street view cars.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  Exactly. You're really teaching the car just from the perspective of a car, right? It's solely seeing what cars see.

• 7:28John Coogan?

  Get the blinders on.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  And what, what those cars don't see in training is video games or is inside a conference or in an office or in a home, or just the multitude of scenarios that exist in the world. And what we very much believe is that a world model shouldn't learn from a narrow distribution of the world, like a series of driving examples or robot examples. It should be that you learn from every possible thing that could exist in the world. And then you tune the model to the task of driving. So you have a base that's just very general, and then you provide driverless car data at the very last step. And so really our belief is that that will produce a more robust, more intelligent system than these very narrowly trained models.

• 8:10John Coogan?

  I love that. Makes sense. Completely tracks with the GPT two, GPT three progression and language models. There was no point when people said, oh, well, we really want to solve IMO level math. So let's get rid of all the fiction. No, it was always include everything, right?

• 8:25Speaker 02

  Exactly. You need Harry Potter to solve math problems.

• 8:28John Coogan?

  Hilarious. Very odd scenario, but it is true.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 8:32John Coogan?

  I'm interested in the more expensive pieces of data that I could imagine you'll be acquiring in six months, maybe a year, maybe five years. I don't know. But we've heard about data labelers making seven figures, creating RL environments for very specific tasks, very niche use cases.

• 8:53Jordi Hays?

  Just seven?

• 8:55John Coogan?

  I mean, it's gonna be eight next, next month, next quarter. But, uh, but, but truly like the idea that, uh, the data labeling that went into early driverless cars, but also early reinforcement learning, uh, human feedback on text L L Ms was just, is this acceptable? Is this readable? Does this have typos? And now it's, does this actually track to case law? Or does this look like a financial model that I could turn in at an investment bank? Uh, what is the world model equivalent of that? Can you imagine what that will look like?

• 9:29Speaker 02

  I can. So I think if you look at AlphaStar, which was DeepMind's, uh, training of agents inside StarCraft to then beat StarCraft players, which was incredible. Really what you had was agents learning inside this environment that doesn't update or improve. StarCraft is StarCraft. The agents then have a ceiling on their performance because it's always StarCraft that they're learning with them.

• 9:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  And so I think what world models really promise is the ability to be a learning environment that's continuously improving and adapting to the agent's intelligence. So for example, an agent should be able to learn within a world model that is consistently improving over time. It's getting more robust. It's getting more diverse. There's more scenarios. And so the agent's intelligence being trained inside that world model should also get more robust.

• 10:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's so fascinating because yeah, training a model to win at a video game is one thing, but the real world is never fixed in place the way a video game is.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  Exactly, yes. And a world model really can be thought of as this sort of infinite simulation, right? It's continuously generating new types of environment that the R L agent can explore and adapt to and fight within and all these, these cool things. And so I think actually one of the key or the killer applications of world models will be a learning environment for AIs. Language models, other types of AIs can all learn within world models. Gets very much, um,

• 10:51John Coogan?

  Philosophical.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 10:52John Coogan?

  Yes, staying on philosophy, uh, if there are, there are many, many labs that have made the bet that, uh, text is the universal interface, scale and maybe coding, software only singularity. There's a number of different buzzwords to sort of define this idea that like L L Ms are on the path. Then you have the folks who are arguing that everything from L L Ms are a dead end to deep learning is a deep end, blah, blah, blah. But, uh, what I'm interested in is your, if you're looking at, there's clearly progress going on in text-based, code-based L L Ms that feels like a path to something called A G I. Maybe that happened two years ago. Maybe it's happening two years from now, but it feels like there's a trajectory there. Are world models like the next step? Is it a separate curve?

• 11:38John Coogan?

  Will they come together and work together to produce whatever the next, the next paradigm is? How do these two technologies and like paths converge or diverge on the tech tree?

• 11:49Speaker 02

  One slight tangent is, uh, one of those critics for language models, Gary Marcus.

• 11:53John Coogan?

  Yes. I wasn't gonna call him out by name, but you're welcome.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  Me and him and many others in driverless cars have been bickering for some time.

• 12:02John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, cuz he's driving, he's an Uber guy, I forgot.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  Well, before language models were the debate, it was all about driverless cars. And when they would come to Marcus at 2050, 2040, it's like, no, it's gonna happen much sooner. Conveniently, he's now moved on from that being the debate. But anyways, so my, my belief is that language models are learning.

• 12:19Jordi Hays?

  There was some new cope yesterday as well that I was seeing that maybe I couldn't bring up.

• 12:24John Coogan?

  Fish cope, okay, anyway.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  My, my belief.

• 12:27Jordi Hays?

  Cope is evolving almost as, basically as fast.

• 12:30John Coogan?

  Fast takeoff in cope.

• 12:31Jordi Hays?

  As the models themselves.

• 12:32John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, yeah.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  That's the frustrating thing that goalpost is just moving, moving, moving.

• 12:37John Coogan?

  We have physical goalposts that we move around the studio because there's always a new goal.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  It's ridiculous.

• 12:43John Coogan?

  But that's the, that's what makes it fun. It would be boring if we breached the goal and we were done.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  That is true.

• 12:46John Coogan?

  We wanna keep building.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  That is true. Uh, and so what I very much believe is that language models are gonna continue on the trajectory. They're exceptional technologies. They will lead to a form of superintelligence that's amazing, changes the world, of course. What I believe they learn from though primarily is a sort of biased representation of the world. And it's our writing of the world. And it's also a remarkably, I think, inefficient representation of the world. If you were to describe what's going on here in text, imagine everything, every detail was somehow describable by text. How long would that representation be? It'd be huge, right? As I pull out my phone, I capture two, three seconds. I've captured so much detail of humans intermingling and everything.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  So I very much believe that they are almost distinct, somewhat complementary technologies. There'll be cases like coding, incredible for language models. I don't think world models will play in that market too much. And creative writing and many other emails and things like that, amazing for language models. World models, I think, will play this role of operating within either virtual or physical worlds. And that those will be just distinct applications. It, a world model will prove to be a better driver of a car than a language model. A world model will prove to be a better operator of a robot than a language model, flyer of a drone, creator of a video game, uh, educational experiences even. I think they'll prove to be distinct.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  I do think there is a convergence somewhat of the, the learning environment thing I mentioned, that world models will serve as this universe for language models to, uh, learn with them. And that's maybe where it converges at some point.

• 14:21Jordi Hays?

  Selfish question on autonomous driving. How do you see the market evolving from here? I've been having a lot of conversations recently where people are, um, buying, buying Teslas, not specifically because they want a Tesla, but because they want the, uh, autonomous functionality. And I feel like a lot of the manufacturers are in a lot more trouble than maybe they even realize because there's plenty of drivers today where if you have a maybe 10, 20 minute commute daily, you're not really thinking about how do I solve this problem? But for people that are driving any longer than that, it's starting to be like top of mind. That's like the number one factor. Um, how, how do you see this evolving? Is it gonna be like language models and that there's a bunch of different providers

• 15:06Jordi Hays?

  with like pretty good autonomous driving? Uh, we're not seeing it quite yet. I think you can see, you know, the.

• 15:13John Coogan?

  It's two wildly different companies that are both exceptional, right?

• 15:16Jordi Hays?

  Right, yeah.

• 15:16John Coogan?

  I mean, right now you have Waymo and Tesla, yeah.

• 15:19Jordi Hays?

  And Waymo, and then there's a bunch of.

• 15:21John Coogan?

  But like wildly different.

• 15:22Jordi Hays?

  Tertiary players.

• 15:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:24Speaker 02

  So I see it going something like this, which is that firstly, consumers, word of mouth matters. And as many people are now trying Teslas, it's going to become almost, um, insurmountable for many of the car companies to compete with just how good a Tesla is.

• 15:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:39Speaker 02

  All things, not just driverless car, uh, driverless functionality. And so I, I think we'll see the continued sort of, um, attrition in the smaller car brands converging into Tesla. That's one thing. Second thing is I think it's becoming almost, um, what's the right word here? Like, uh, um, a, a national crisis to not enforce driverless technology.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  I have two kids and it's, uh, today still the leading cause of childhood death is car crashes. And the idea that we have this technology now where I can literally walk out here and be driven fully driverlessly back to my house like 40 miles away.

• 16:19John Coogan?

  But can you, can you put on a, a sympathetic hat and try and have some empathy for the ambulance chasers?

• 16:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the trial lawyers.

• 16:27John Coogan?

  The trial lawyers.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  They are people too.

• 16:30John Coogan?

  What are you, I mean, yeah, you have to.

• 16:31Jordi Hays?

  It's their livelihood.

• 16:33John Coogan?

  No, uh.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  I didn't know where that was going.

• 16:37John Coogan?

  Coming back to, uh, diffusion and self-driving, I want to, uh, go back to that idea of like 2050 prediction. It sounds ridiculous because you can walk out on the street and see one driving around San Francisco. But if you rephrase the question on driverless cars to a billion driverless cars, full diffusion such that there are, you know, like they make themselves available everywhere over the world. It's the dominant vehicle pattern. That actually does take time. It's more of an industrial process than a technology breakthrough. Um, how are you processing diffusion of A I tools, L L Ms? And will world models follow the same trajectory as L L M diffusion, which is really fast? Everyone uses them for everything, but they haven't taken all the jobs.

• 17:21John Coogan?

  And we're sort of in this interim thing where it's amazing, but it's additive and it's sort of unexpected to everyone. Both the people that were like, it's fake and both the people that were like, it's God. You know, it's like, we kinda get the middle case.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 17:31John Coogan?

  It's just like, okay, things are going well, keep building.

• 17:35Speaker 02

  I, so specific to world models, I think that there'll be a very similar shot progression of adoption that we've seen with language models. There'll be some killer applications that become very clear very soon. The idea that you could type a prompt and get out a triple A level game.

• 17:48John Coogan?

  Incredible.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  Doesn't seem crazy to me. Multiplayer games too. The idea that you could have generally capable robots in your house and offices and everything else enabled by these models becomes clear. And then yes, driverless technologies and many others. And so, yeah, I think as what becomes, the thing I always lent on in driverless cars. Is even if you didn't believe in the technology, you just have to look at the volume of people and the smarts of the researchers behind it and how much dollars was going into investing in that category. To assume it's gonna get figured out at some point, right? It's not an impossibility that we'll have driverless cars. And so you put enough smart people behind it, it's gonna get done. And I, I think the same with humanoids, for example, like there's just so much capital, so much talent flowing into that space. It's gonna get solved, right? It's just an inevitability.

• 18:32Speaker 02

  You just keep going and I think, uh, this is why I have such faith that, yeah, we should. I mean, there's no reason now we shouldn't have a billion driverless cars in the world.

• 18:40Jordi Hays?

  But timelines, by 2030, will I be able to walk in and get a Honda and have it have autonomous driving capabilities? That's as good as Tesla's is today. Not even, not even, not even what Tesla will be in 2030, but like a Tesla, Ford, you know, these other manufacturers.

• 18:57John Coogan?

  2030 is like two years away.

• 18:59Jordi Hays?

  No, but, but I, but I'm just saying like it's like, I, I, I'm curious because I think every passing year, all of these manufacturers are just in more trouble.

• 19:08John Coogan?

  Maybe, yeah.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think they get in their own way, right? So I think a company will build a technology that they could sell to a Honda or other companies that is driverless ready on that scale in 2030, absolutely. I mean, we've got literal superintelligence coming that can write code of crazy quantities and such. So I, I think so. Then it's really the car company's decision about, do I want this? Will I adopt it or will I continue to burn money internally, failing at building it myself?

• 19:34John Coogan?

  Last question, uh, how important is at least?

• 19:40John Coogan?

  Developing some of the application muscle to go to market like Suno just went viral in our office. We're all addicted to Suno now. And there's been these moments where like, okay, everyone's on mid journey. It's really fun. And like, it's this, it's this platform. And then it accrues a lot of value. It can sometimes be baggage because you're building, you're like, okay, now I'm a consumer company. How do you think about value capture and how much you want to be the front end to just prompt, get a, get a game?

• 20:10Speaker 02

  So my answer would be that I'm actually not happy with my answer, but sometimes I get asked, what are we good at? Odyssey, right? And so my answer to that is that we need to be great at everything. And the reason I say that is because if you're building a very foundational technology, it really does need to be great at all of these different tasks. And we need to stay focused on that instead of getting really focused on a minute case. And so, yeah, long story short, I very much believe that by building this foundational technology along the way, you'll discover by talking to companies, talking to researchers, really cool stuff.

• 20:43John Coogan?

  Some of them might be partners, some of them might be in-house. Well, I'm very excited for it. I'm so ready. I can feel that the moment's coming. Congratulations on the progress. Thank you for all the work you're doing. Thanks for coming on the show.

• 20:53Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 20:53John Coogan?

  Happy to see you.

• 20:54Speaker 02

  Thank you so much.

• 20:55John Coogan?

  Cheers. Your time here. While we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Ramp. Time is money. Save both. He's used corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. And we are, we have a soundboard here. We are joined by the founder and CEO of Ideogram, Mohammed. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 21:12Jordi Hays?

  Suit it up.

• 21:13Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me.

• 21:13Jordi Hays?

  Looking good.

• 21:14John Coogan?

  Thanks for hopping on.

• 21:15Speaker 03

  You guys are looking good, too.

• 21:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's the right place for us. Why don't you introduce the company a little bit? I know a fair amount, but for the viewers who don't, the shape of the company and the product and sort of the target market at this particular juncture.

• 21:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. So if you think about it, we already have content creation in front of us. If you think of the industry, you know, we had the early days of image generation. And if you look through your social media feed, you see a lot of AI generated video. But we think there's an inflection point that design, marketing can also take advantage of generative AI. And that's what we're building at Ideogram, the AI foundation for enterprise adoption of the next phase of content and design.

• 22:01Jordi Hays?

  So do you think that something like image generation can be fully solved within a shorter period of time than, let's say, intellectual intelligence?

• 22:14Speaker 03

  It's kind of interesting because when you think of image generation, you can have a very detailed document and diagram and really technical design as part of an image, you know?

• 22:26John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:27Speaker 03

  It's not necessarily simple.

• 22:29John Coogan?

  If you're saying generate a blackboard with a solution to a IMO level math problem on it, the model needs to understand that level of math.

• 22:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, think of the circuit design or architecture design. And that's the same level of complexity as a lot of the reasoning problems we're trying to solve now. So it depends on how you look at it.

• 22:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, I was asking from the lens of, I think, everyone on earth now has now viewed an AI image, not known it was, 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.

• 23:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. If you, if you think, one is, we still have issues with consistency. It'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, have my logo, it has to be 100% accurate, you know? With product photography, it has to be exactly correct. I can't buy a piece of clothing and then it doesn't, it doesn't match the picture. So when it comes to consistency, you're still lacking. But then part of the dream is to

• 24:13Speaker 03

  help with the design of future products, you know? The creative part of design requires a lot of understanding of the context. And then the brand DNA and putting them together to design the next generation of cars or just 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.

• 24:43Jordi Hays?

  To me, that is, I will just say, the most, 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, and, you know, getting, 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, than getting to the 95.

• 25:09John Coogan?

  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, check 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 like, the problems that you're hearing from enterprises and what you're focused on solving in the short term.

• 25:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, one thing is data sovereignty. And honestly, 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. And imagine sending that over to the cloud. And then that creates a lot of potential issues.

• 26:06John Coogan?

  Does that mean they want to run your models on prem? Or does that mean that they're just want to know that you're hosting it in a certain, certain secure way with a certain SLA around, we're not going to train on this?

• 26:15Speaker 03

  I would say both.

• 26:16John Coogan?

  Both? Okay.

• 26:17Speaker 03

  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 vein. And that creates a new set of opportunities for us in terms of licensing and partnership, where companies can host these models on prem. That brings down their costs, but also data sovereignty is really important. So on the design side, that's one thing you're hearing a lot. And then on the brand side, this is still consistency is an issue, but we think we're going to solve that in the next few months.

• 26:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. There's a big, 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. So 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 like a headwind to your business?

• 27:30Speaker 03

  On the image side, actually, it seems like American companies are doing really well. And we are at the frontier. So it's not as big of an issue. And then 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, for really unique defense problems, where you don't have a ton of the training data. And 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 the real world. And that's another example where, again, having it on prem is important

• 28:15Speaker 03

  because they don't want to

• 28:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, share that out.

• 28:18Speaker 03

  Share that data with everyone else.

• 28:20John Coogan?

  Interesting, interesting. What, 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.

• 28:39Speaker 03

  Right. 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

• 29:00Speaker 03

  With AI agents, it's become so easy to, you know, give it the the architecture and then get it to be optimized for 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 four point O model.

• 29:21John Coogan?

  How much does the roadmap at AMD and other semiconductor companies affect how you're designing your product? Do 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 like, and then, okay, let's design the best model for that rack or that chip.

• 29:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. So we we often customize the details of an architecture based on price, performance, latency, and then work backwards and train 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. But the problem is you also don't know too much about the future chips.

• 30:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe that's why you gotta come here, meet the people, whisper, oh, wow, really? That's what it's gonna be? Okay, we'll work backwards from that. Or maybe you just have a proper, you know, deal and everything's about.

• 30:27Speaker 04

  Right.

• 30:28Jordi Hays?

  We didn't get to this, but before we leave, what were you doing before this?

• 30:32Speaker 03

  Oh, I was at Google before this. And before that, I was a computer 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 big impact.

• 30:46John Coogan?

  How much of the team is researchers at Ideogram now?

• 30:49Speaker 03

  It's about fifty fifty.

• 30:51John Coogan?

  Fifty fifty?

• 30:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, we have a relatively small team. It's primarily engineering.

• 30:56John Coogan?

  That's really cool.

• 30:56Speaker 03

  And half of it focusing on the product and half of it is focusing on the model.

• 31:00John Coogan?

  Sounds like a dream. Well, congratulations on the progress. Thank you so much.

• 31:03Speaker 03

  Thanks so much.

• 31:04Speaker 04

  Great to have you.

• 31:04John Coogan?

  Great to meet you.

• 31:05Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for coming on.

• 31:06John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 31:07Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 31:08John Coogan?

  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.

• 31:31Jordi Hays?

  Welcome.

• 31:31John Coogan?

  Welcome back. How you doing? Great to see you. How you doing? I love it.

• 31:37Jordi Hays?

  Just saying hi.

• 31:40Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 31:41John Coogan?

  Thank you, man.

• 31:42Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 31:45Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 31:46Speaker 04

  What's up, boys? Good to see you again.

• 31:47John Coogan?

  Good to see you again.

• 31:48Jordi Hays?

  I think this is third time.

• 31:50Speaker 04

  Oh, man, that jacket is so sharp.

• 31:52Jordi Hays?

  The TVN green.

• 31:54Speaker 04

  That's the TVN green. Okay.

• 31:56Jordi Hays?

  We'll we'll coordinate. We'll connect you to our tailor.

• 31:58John Coogan?

  Do you have a do you have a brand color yet for AMP?

• 32:01Speaker 04

  We have, we have the cream and the forest green.

• 32:05Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 32:05Speaker 04

  We actually have a forest green coming.

• 32:07John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 32:07Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 32:08Speaker 04

  There's a new video model that just got announced this morning called Flux Three.

• 32:12John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 32:12Speaker 04

  That's training on the AMP grid and it's from Black Forest Labs.

• 32:16John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 32:16Speaker 04

  And they're up in the Black Forest, like near Freiburg in Germany.

• 32:19Jordi Hays?

  Wait, say AMP grid again.

• 32:20Speaker 04

  The AMP grid.

• 32:23John Coogan?

  That's a good sound effect for the AMP grid. I like it. It's a good branding.

• 32:27Jordi Hays?

  We'll give you the sound effect. We'll have our tailor, talk to your tailor, figure it all out.

• 32:32Speaker 04

  Careful what you wish for, man. I would love the recommendation on that, but Black Forest Labs, their color is forest green.

• 32:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 32:38Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 32:39Speaker 04

  Because, yeah, forest, et cetera. And I find it's a very soothing color.

• 32:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:43Speaker 04

  There's some like, I think there's some like neuropsychology around like green immediately calms you down.

• 32:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. You don't want caution yellow or, you know, high vis orange. That's a little bit more aggressive.

• 32:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, there's some companies that make orange work.

• 32:55John Coogan?

  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 in branding.

• 33:03Speaker 04

  A sixteen Z is orange.

• 33:05John Coogan?

  But that's a high vis.

• 33:05Speaker 04

  That's not high vis.

• 33:06John Coogan?

  It's like reflective orange. You know what I'm talking about? You see it on the road.

• 33:10Speaker 04

  That's hard, man.

• 33:10John Coogan?

  That is an aggressive, that's hard to pull off as a brand. How are you thinking about the brand? Do you have a whole brand book yet?

• 33:17Speaker 04

  We're we're going with the vibes and the aura, man. It's like, as as I've learned, just the vibes, generally, the vibes like are

• 33:30Speaker 04

  in the space of frontier AI, which you guys have been an extraordinary voice on.

• 33:37Speaker 04

  Stuff changes every day. And so nobody's got any time to look at the first principles, the details, what's actually happening, what we're like, which model is coming out? What's the difference between Fable Five and like 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.

• 33:56Jordi Hays?

  I'm surprised we haven't seen a chief aura officer yet. That's that's the next like chief, chief brand officer. But when somebody does that, sell everything.

• 34:06John Coogan?

  Probably too much. Once there's a name for the trend, it's a little rough.

• 34:09Jordi Hays?

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

• 34:25John Coogan?

  Motion is underrated. There's a, it should be an AI company, research in motion. That would be good.

• 34:31Speaker 04

  Wasn't that BlackBerry?

• 34:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:33John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 34:33Speaker 04

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

• 34:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:38Speaker 04

  And we stand for output maxing.

• 34:40John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 34:40Speaker 04

  Right? The the

• 34:42John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 34:42Speaker 04

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

• 34:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:48Speaker 04

  Bitter lesson holds.

• 34:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:49Speaker 04

  That scale, scale, scale.

• 34:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:51Speaker 04

  But the brain is naturally anchored to large numbers.

• 34:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:56Speaker 04

  But nobody, like, if you actually deconstruct what's going on, this space, there's so much wastage because nobody's doing the output maxing efficiency play, right? Which is what's the output divided by the unit of input?

• 35:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:08Speaker 04

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

• 35:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:18Speaker 04

  Right?

• 35:18John Coogan?

  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.

• 35:27Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 35:27John Coogan?

  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.

• 35:37Speaker 04

  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.

• 35:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:43Speaker 04

  Right? You cannot beat China at pure scaling. It's not gonna happen.

• 35:48John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 35:48Speaker 04

  Industrial, like industrial scale coordination, where they go, you know what? Ban the H one hundred, the H two hundred. 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 K three, I don't care, I'm Xi Jinping, like, I just want for us to be at the frontier.

• 36:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:06Jordi Hays?

  And make, you know, a hundred new nuclear plants, whatever.

• 36:10Speaker 04

  Build, build, build, baby. Like, you know, build, scale, whatever is required. You ask the permitting, who needs permitting? Just like, you know, they will just clear all the bottlenecks and they have been at a scale we don't understand. But they will bring at least a hundred gigawatts of new energy capacity online in the next decade without even blinking.

• 36:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:27Speaker 04

  Meanwhile, they weren't even AI pilled and they were planning on doing it anyway. So like, yeah.

• 36:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:32Speaker 04

  So what do we have to do? We have to be smarter.

• 36:34John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 36:34Speaker 04

  We have to do output maxing. We've got to be more efficient. Only fifteen percent of every single tenant data center today in the United States is being utilized. Net flops utilization is less than twenty percent in the United States. It is crazy.

• 36:50John Coogan?

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

• 36:58Speaker 04

  Basically, for every dollar of long term lease that an AI lab takes today, you lose about thirty, forty percent flops in just bad scheduling. The nodes are just straight up not allocated.

• 37:07John Coogan?

  Yep, yep. And then within Chips there, but it's just not getting work at the right time.

• 37:10Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 37:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 37:11Speaker 04

  Then within the chip,

• 37:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:13Speaker 04

  you only have like fifteen percent of the chip being utilized. That's called MFU model flop utilization.

• 37:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:17Speaker 04

  Because the chip is waiting around for some other process to complete, storage, memory, networking, or some other chip to hand it off.

• 37:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:22Speaker 04

  So as a result, if you compound those two things, of every dollar, only fifteen percent of flops are actually being utilized.

• 37:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:28Speaker 04

  That eighty five percent, that's a national security crisis.

• 37:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:32Speaker 04

  Because that's what's keeping us from staying at the frontier.

• 37:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:34Speaker 04

  That's why we all keep complaining about, oh, Kimi K three came out. Sure, you could 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?

• 38:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:02Jordi Hays?

  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. And then, 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.

• 38:25Speaker 04

  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. And there's not enough sites. We're going to need nuclear. Where's?

• 38:41John Coogan?

  Are you spending time in nuclear companies?

• 38:43Speaker 04

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

• 38:45John Coogan?

  Hi Seth. How you doing?

• 38:46Speaker 04

  Seth is a founder of a company called Mavria that we've just invested in. I don't think-

• 38:50John Coogan?

  Good to meet you.

• 38:51Speaker 04

  He was pop on the show.

• 38:52John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 38:53Speaker 04

  Pop on the show after-

• 38:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, after he gets off. Well, yeah, we'll talk to you. Go over there, talk to them.

• 38:58Speaker 04

  Don't grab me with a good talk.

• 38:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Talk to the team.

• 39:00Speaker 04

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

• 39:11John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 39:11Speaker 04

  And he's, thank you for your service, Seth.

• 39:13John Coogan?

  Okay. We'll give you a proper mic in a couple of minutes. We got one more question. We, I know you gotta-

• 39:19Jordi Hays?

  So walk us through the shape of your business right now. You have the fund, you're making new investments.

• 39:24Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 39:25Jordi Hays?

  You got a big allocation in, I think, obviously, every, you know, Anthropic round to date. But otherwise, like, what is the shape of the business? You're building out, like, you're, to me, it's like, two different businesses. They work, they're very interlinked. But how are you spending your time?

• 39:42Speaker 04

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

• 39:49John Coogan?

  You don't make a single chip there.

• 39:50Speaker 04

  We do not make any chips.

• 39:52John Coogan?

  Stolen dollars. Not yet. Who knows? I wouldn't put it past you.

• 39:55Speaker 04

  At least that's a great partner. But our infrastructure arm, which we're actually spinning out pretty soon, as an independent entity-

• 40:07John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 40:07Speaker 04

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

• 40:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, we know.

• 40:11Speaker 04

  So that's for a follow up.

• 40:12Jordi Hays?

  Great.

• 40:13Speaker 04

  Is building out about 2 gigawatts of capacity in the United States.

• 40:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 40:16Speaker 04

  And we're not making our own chips yet.

• 40:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:19Speaker 04

  But we're building out new, there's new sites.

• 40:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 40:22Speaker 04

  There's new-

• 40:23John Coogan?

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

• 40:29Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 40:29John Coogan?

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

• 40:37Jordi Hays?

  Oh, 6.

• 40:37John Coogan?

  Oh, 6 gigawatts? Is that what it is?

• 40:38Jordi Hays?

  Up to 6.

• 40:39John Coogan?

  But I'm interested in, first, it just seems like another positive sign for the industry for Anthropic and AMD.

• 40:46Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 40:46John Coogan?

  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, 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 the full, it's a full ecosystem, the economy is growing. And so, this part, this type of partnership makes sense. But what do you tell, how are you telling an earlier stage founder, if they're trying to do a strategic deal?

• 41:14Speaker 04

  Well, well past the circular part. I mean, these were all concerns maybe two years ago.

• 41:20John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 41:21Speaker 04

  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 then, and most of that revenue is coming from everyday customers using FUD to code.

• 41:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:40Speaker 04

  That's not circular, that's net just new value creation.

• 41:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:42Speaker 04

  Right? Now, the question is, how do you keep a healthy, independent ecosystem, all kinds of frontier capabilities churning?

• 41:48John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 41:49Speaker 04

  And the problem is that the, 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 financing. And so what we need in the United States is a financing program that says, okay, we're gonna be able to turn startups, and 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 underwriteable by the financial markets, right?

• 42:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:31Speaker 04

  And I think what we've got to do in the United States is do a little bit of innovation to go, how do you get the ecosystem to understand the quality of these startups?

• 42:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 42:42Speaker 04

  They're the engine of innovation. There's where, you know, Anthropic is 5,000-ish people today. Google is, last time I checked, like, 60,000 people.

• 42:51Jordi Hays?

  Accenture is 75,000.

• 42:54Speaker 04

  And neither Accenture nor Google are responsible for frontier model innovation today.

• 42:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:59Speaker 04

  Like, Google still hasn't put out an Anthropic-grade coding model.

• 43:03John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 43:04Speaker 04

  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.

• 43:12John Coogan?

  Speaking of that, are large founding teams underrated?

• 43:16Speaker 04

  Are large founding teams underrated?

• 43:18John Coogan?

  Because there's a world where Anthropic's like the exception to the rule.

• 43:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:21John Coogan?

  It's working for them.

• 43:22Speaker 04

  Right.

• 43:22John Coogan?

  Crazy. I mean, young company, but huge company, all the founders still there.

• 43:27Jordi Hays?

  Andurall's another great example.

• 43:28John Coogan?

  Andurall is five, and, you know, strong team. There was a while where, you know, the Silicon Valley wisdom was like two, maybe three.

• 43:36Speaker 04

  Right. Yeah, most startup advice, as you guys know, is designed for the median outcome.

• 43:44John Coogan?

  It's fun for podcasts.

• 43:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. But the outlier businesses, they, they have large founding teams, they have family founding teams.

• 43:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:53Speaker 04

  Like the Stripe brothers.

• 43:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:54Speaker 04

  The conventional wisdom is, don't start, you know, like-

• 43:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, don't mix personal and business.

• 44:00Speaker 04

  And Dario and Daniela are brother and sister. The Collison's a brother and sister.

• 44:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:04Speaker 04

  Black Forest Labs is 12 co-founders, they're all researchers.

• 44:07John Coogan?

  I had no idea.

• 44:08Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I, you know, I think outliers do their own thing.

• 44:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:13Speaker 04

  And that's, that's the point. It's like, whatever it takes to compete at the frontier.

• 44:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:18Speaker 04

  And as long as you're super aligned and tight, I think that's what matters.

• 44:22Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Let's say you're, let's say you're talking, you do have a panel in a second. I wish we could go 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 like, okay, a lot of, 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 gonna come from? Right? Because like, finance is an interesting category, but it's, I don't see,

• 45:01Jordi Hays?

  you know, 200 billion of, you know, financial modeling spend on tokens, right? So where, where are you predicting or thinking about these sort of like, next legs, next legs up after coding?

• 45:19Speaker 04

  So the gift that keeps giving still is reinforcement learning. Like, RL is just working.

• 45:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:24Speaker 04

  Like, it's a technology, it's so simple. It's like training, training a dog, right? Like, hey fighter, go fetch, you did right.

• 45:31Jordi Hays?

  Here's a treat.

• 45:32Speaker 04

  Here's a treat. And reward modeling is, is, 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 then 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.

• 46:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:03Speaker 04

  You know, because you guys know this, like, capabilities, there's a jagged frontier, you know, 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 truly internalized, like, how generalizable this concept of, like, 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 gonna see crazy capabilities. So one example is Periodic Labs. It's one of our portfolio companies.

• 46:37Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 46:37Speaker 04

  They're trying to discover a room temperature superconductor. The pace of progress there has been extraordinary in the last like six months. They've got a 40,000 square foot facility in Menlo Park.

• 46:47John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 46:47Speaker 04

  Where you 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. So you can do X-ray diffraction to test, does it have it or not? You, 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.

• 47:16John Coogan?

  It's exciting.

• 47:17Speaker 04

  The capabilities ladder is extraordinary.

• 47:20John Coogan?

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

• 47:27Speaker 04

  Good to see you guys.

• 47:28John Coogan?

  It's always a pleasure.

• 47:29Speaker 04

  I hear I'm just the opening act for Lisa, so she's next and have fun.

• 47:32John Coogan?

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

• 47:48Jordi Hays?

  How much do you bench?

• 47:49Speaker 05

  This morning, 3.35.

• 47:51Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 47:52John Coogan?

  Amazing, can you lift this microphone up to your mouth? Thank you.

• 47:56Jordi Hays?

  And move, maybe move it over a little bit?

• 47:58John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 47:58Jordi Hays?

  The other way.

• 47:59John Coogan?

  Oh, like this.

• 48:00Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 48:00John Coogan?

  There's a loud room, loud room. Anyway, loud and clear, give us an introduction, yourself and the company.

• 48:06Speaker 05

  Hey guys, my name is Seth Cohen. I am one of the co-founders of Mavria 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. Before this, I was Chief Counsel of Nuclear Policy at the Department of Energy.

• 48:23John Coogan?

  Oh, no way.

• 48:25Speaker 05

  The, depending on who you ask, either a senior advisor or the conservator of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And an advisor at NASA.

• 48:33John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 48:34Speaker 05

  So I was the DOGE operative, one of two, responsible for implementing the president's nuclear executive orders across the government.

• 48:41John Coogan?

  Very cool, yeah.

• 48:41Jordi Hays?

  All right, what were you doing before that? Because that doesn't seem like the first job.

• 48:45Speaker 05

  Supreme Court and appellate litigation at a firm called Kirkland.

• 48:48John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 48:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, heard of that.

• 48:51John Coogan?

  So the hat says nuclear, you introduced the company as AI infrastructure. Like, is that because AI is the hot trend and nuclear is just like the byproduct? Or are you a pure nuclear company? Like, 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?

• 49:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, so one of the things that my, 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. We needed to solve a couple of other things.

• 49:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:34Speaker 05

  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 in the world.

• 49:51Jordi Hays?

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

• 49:54Speaker 05

  It's good to be among friends. But 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 pile up a waste, completely off limits, to where we are now. 27 governors applied for this program that Adam and I started called the Nuclear Lifecycle 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 backend fuel cycle.

• 50:25John Coogan?

  So would that be one, they're competing with one additional nuclear waste storage plant?

• 50:30Speaker 05

  Three, to be one of three. And these are going to be cities, by the way, that, that if everything goes according to plan, will be competitive with our major metropolitan areas because we're going to re-industrialize around them.

• 50:41John Coogan?

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

• 50:48Speaker 05

  Well, so it's not, you know, to take a step back.

• 50:53Jordi Hays?

  Is it too late to offer up my backyard?

• 50:58John Coogan?

  The ultimate Yumby.

• 50:59Speaker 05

  No, I, 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.

• 51:09John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Glowing.

• 51:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, I have seen the blue glow of a spent fuel rod, which is actually very, very cool, but there's no green goo.

• 51:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:17Speaker 05

  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.

• 51:27John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. I didn't realize that.

• 51:28Speaker 05

  By volume.

• 51:29John Coogan?

  That falls in there. You think of it as like the pellets, but it's really anything that touches that. So there needs to be a whole processing facility for that, that makes sense.

• 51:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's most, but the second is commercial spent fuel.

• 51:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:39Speaker 05

  And just so we're clear, it's, 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. It has to be taken out of a reactor.

• 51:51Jordi Hays?

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

• 51:59Speaker 05

  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 materials. 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. We have 100,000 tons of this stuff. And this is from the lifetime of the commercial fleet.

• 52:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:40Speaker 05

  Which by the way, that fits in one football field.

• 52:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:44Speaker 05

  Like 60 years of energy.

• 52:45John Coogan?

  But also should be repurposed in some way.

• 52:48Speaker 05

  Yeah. That, there is four times more energy sitting on those pads outside of our reactors than Saudi Arabia has in its proven oil reserves.

• 52:56John Coogan?

  That's actually crazy.

• 52:58Speaker 05

  But that's not where the money is.

• 52:59John Coogan?

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

• 53:05Jordi Hays?

  Wait, but close, close the loop here. So there's, there's all this sort of like latent energy potential. I imagine you're doing something with it.

• 53:13Speaker 05

  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, of a real energy revolution in the United States. But I think the, to understand why we're shifting, right? It's, it's the weave. Um, the, to 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. Like Utah and Tennessee both made their applications public and they are awesome.

• 53:57Speaker 05

  Well, 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. A lot of it is public perception.

• 54:19Jordi Hays?

  They're deeply popular with like 5% of the country.

• 54:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, less.

• 54:25Speaker 05

  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're, we are in stealth.

• 54:48John Coogan?

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

• 54:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, thank you guys so much for having me on. It's been a pleasure.

• 54:54John Coogan?

  Great to meet you.

• 54:55Jordi Hays?

  Enjoy the, enjoy the rest of the conference, great to meet you.

• 54:57John Coogan?

  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 Sue joins in about 25 minutes. Google has the muscle to overpower spending worries, says the Wall Street Journal. Google has put up some very impressive cloud growth numbers. There of course was some back and forth on, on the nature of that revenue. With semi-analysis sort of jokingly maybe posting, Google Cloud generates revenue primarily from the sale of TPU systems.

• 55:40John Coogan?

  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 the, it's not that Google Cloud is fully pivoting to TPU sales exclusively. It is that they are also.

• 56:08Jordi Hays?

  But it's becoming meaningful.

• 56:09John Coogan?

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

• 56:14Jordi Hays?

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

• 56:17John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. We can go through, there's a number of different posts here. We can take you through Eric Suft talking back and forth about.

• 56:30Jordi Hays?

  Soufenator?

• 56:31John Coogan?

  The Soufenator'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.

• 56:46Jordi Hays?

  Just do it.

• 56:48John Coogan?

  So it's a bit of a longer post, but it all started with Sundar Pichai's news. He said, Q2 was an amazing quarter with our AI investments redefining what's possible across every part of our business. Alphabet revenue grew 24% year over year and Google Cloud accelerated to 82% growth, which is insane. That is the foghorn for sure. We saw an 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, I'm, like the numbers have gotten so big on tokens per minute, tokens per month, that it's very hard to keep, 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.

• 57:32John Coogan?

  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, you know, monetizing the advertising, so. 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 manufactured revenue growth via short-sighted, highly extractive, customer-hostile tactics, i.e. charge advertisers more for lower-quality

• 58:14John Coogan?

  clicks, including clicks they do not want and explicitly do not approve Google to charge them for. He gives a few examples. He's going back and forth, saying that this is, you know, 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 monetize in parity with those in legacy search, and Google's search revenue increased by 19% in Q1 and

• 58:59John Coogan?

  17% in Q2. So 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 individuals' search phrases to bid on. There's a different thing. But suvenator 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. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway

• 59:40John Coogan?

  automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Over 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

• 1:00:18John Coogan?

  damped investors' enthusiasm. Alphabet's 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

• 1:00:59John Coogan?

  stories. You have Lisa Su herself right here. AMD Anthropic signed AI gear deal. We talked to Ashne a little bit about that. And OpenAI 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

• 1:01:40John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:01:51Jordi Hays?

  Serious momentum.

• 1:01:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, the scaling, the increase reflects new agreements with cloud computing providers as OpenAI raises to lock up the enormous amounts of computing capacity it needs to develop and run its AI models. OpenAI's 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. The company said Wednesday would invest $20 billion 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

• 1:02:24Jordi Hays?

  Have you ever been to Georgia?

• 1:02:25John Coogan?

  Yes, I've been to Atlanta. It's a great town. Have you? You've never been?

• 1:02:29Jordi Hays?

  Maybe on a layover.

• 1:02:31John Coogan?

  It's like LA.

• 1:02:31Jordi Hays?

  I don't think I've been outside of

• 1:02:32John Coogan?

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

• 1:02:37Jordi Hays?

  Everywhere.

• 1:02:37John Coogan?

  But it's a really nice city.

• 1:02:38Jordi Hays?

  Liang Wenfeng of DeepSeek had an investor call. I don't have context on how this actually came up, because they're a hedge fund, and they have DeepSeek, still a private

• 1:02:54John Coogan?

  They're raising outside capital now.

• 1:02:55Jordi Hays?

  They're raising outside capital. So, this was probably a part of that roadshow. I think at a certain point, he needs to raise enough money that you gotta just get on Zoom and sell the dream.

• 1:03:05John Coogan?

  But he was grinding for four hours, just monologuing for four. I don't know if he's monologuing for all four, but it is sort of a long call.

• 1:03:12Jordi Hays?

  That's bullish, though. Because if you can go and basically do a Joe Rogan podcast episode, just monologuing. No, it's just like, can somebody actually carry a conversation for that long? Because after, you know, this has always been your take on Joe Rogan. It's like, it gets interesting on Joe Rogan, because by the after an hour, people go off script. And so, if a CEO can carry a conversation for four hours straight and still be compelling, it's bullish. But there are some details that Zephyr shared. He's over at Citrini. Their inference margins are around 85% strong. They only had around 20,000 Hopper equivalents

• 1:03:53Jordi Hays?

  until May. 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. It's 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.

• 1:04:24John Coogan?

  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 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

• 1:05:08John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:05:17Jordi Hays?

  In other news.

• 1:05:19John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:05:33Jordi Hays?

  Gong moment. Cognition is acquiring Interaction, the makers of Poké.

• 1:05:38John Coogan?

  Huge.

• 1:05:39Jordi Hays?

  I think Poké has been an acquisition target or been talked about as an acquisition target for a long time now. They've just made, 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.

• 1:06:02John Coogan?

  Weren't people saying Apple?

• 1:06:03Jordi Hays?

  An Apple would have been amazing. Having the Poké team working on Siri would be quite cool. Could have seen them going to OpenAI or really, you know, even Amazon, right? 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 Poké around? Will it be, will it be just sort of folded into Cognition? But either way, very excited to see what they build.

• 1:06:35John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:07:01Jordi Hays?

  Did the meme?

• 1:07:02John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:07:28Jordi Hays?

  Still crazy that Khan Academy exists and plenty of people still turn it down.

• 1:07:34John Coogan?

  Yes. Oh, they do. They do. Um, yeah, this person didn't though, basically. Go-getters are backing to buy, are backing to buy up HVAC outlet outfits and specialized manufacturers. If they make it back alive, there's a lot of money to be made. What a quote from the Wall Street Journal. So, uh, in 2015, Bakari Akil was a homeless college dropout with a single focus. Figuring out how to get rich, sleeping in WeWorks.

• 1:08:07Jordi Hays?

  WeWorks.

• 1:08:07John Coogan?

  On the subway in an airport waiting areas, Akil watched videos, listened to podcasts. Let's give it up for some podcasts and pored over personal finance books. He needed to own a business, he decided, but how to do it with, how do you do it with no money? Then Akil read a Harvard Business School case study that described how MBA graduates were running around the country, trying to buy companies with money from something called a search fund. He felt like he had discovered a secret. In the decades since Akil, now 37, has bought two multimillion dollar companies. He has spent each month of the past three years living in a different country. So he's doing the, the nomad lifestyle.

• 1:08:44Jordi Hays?

  He's running HVAC companies?

• 1:08:45John Coogan?

  I guess we'll get into it. Uh, he's now worth seven figures. Akil is part of a growing wave of people looking for a shortcut to private equity riches armed with grit and determination. They are ditching the well-worn path from spreadsheet wielding associate to managing director, and finding ways to buy HVAC and plumbing outfits, specialized manufacturers and other small and mid-sized businesses. Financing from, for deals, 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, U, US Small Business Administration, seek funds raised from specialized investors, or cobble together money from friends, family offices, private equity funds,

• 1:09:30John Coogan?

  and SBA licensed small business investment companies. And that's just the start. Convincing the owner to sell and executing an improvement plan is a daunting task, even for the most experienced dealmakers, while these buyers typically pay.

• 1:09:41Jordi Hays?

  Especially if you're overseas constantly?

• 1:09:44John Coogan?

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

• 1:10:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:15John Coogan?

  You know, $200,000, $250,000 sometimes. If you get four students and they're effectively the executive team, and you say, look, we're, we have a million dollars in cash.

• 1:10:24Jordi Hays?

  Buying you an ice cream store.

• 1:10:25John Coogan?

  We're going to lever something up. So we're going to buy a five.

• 1:10:27Jordi Hays?

  That's 200K of, of, of net income.

• 1:10:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:30Jordi Hays?

  And we're going to lever it up.

• 1:10:31John Coogan?

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

• 1:10:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:35John Coogan?

  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, on the fly. I don't know. I don't know if it'll take off. It feels like Alpha School adjacent.

• 1:10:58Jordi Hays?

  But when the time comes.

• 1:11:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:00Jordi Hays?

  Maybe we can get all the kids and say, you guys.

• 1:11:03John Coogan?

  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. But, uh, it doesn't seem that crazy to imagine. But I think, I, I, I think the aura of, uh, of, of certain schools will endure and that will be the right path for some people.

• 1:11:19Jordi Hays?

  For sure.

• 1:11:20John Coogan?

  Uh, anyway, uh, I view these guys as home, 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. Fueling, also fueling their rise, a perception that it isn't as easy as it once was to make big money on Wall Street. Uh, that makes sense. A lot of the big private equity firms were founded decades ago, have founders that have, and partnerships that have accrued a lot of the value.

• 1:12:05John Coogan?

  And, and it's much harder to just scale up something new. The private equity industry is struggling to profitably unload companies, causing mid-level employees dubious of their chances of receiving pay tied to deal performance to jump ship. Some 77 search funds, money from specialized investors to back individuals looking to buy businesses, were raised in 2025. 77 search funds, new search funds listed by the, uh, according to an annual study conducted by researchers at Stanford in 2025. That feels low based on how big the meme was all throughout 2025. Maybe.

• 1:12:37Jordi Hays?

  There's no, there's no way that that's accurate.

• 1:12:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. I, maybe there's some that are, that aren't being caught in like the, in the, in the definition, or they, they, they have defined their company as a, 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 in 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, uh, stuff going on. There, there, there's other stories in here. Caroline Sabat bought a Boston area plumbing business in 2025 and merged it with a smaller one her and her husband had started.

• 1:13:25John Coogan?

  Uh, they got, they got joint degrees from Harvard's Business and Government Schools after nearly 10 years in the US Navy. He was a former Navy SEAL and he met, launched Minuteman Plumbing, Heating and Cooling with a master plumber. He met through a Harvard mentor between graduations, starting his job at a consulting firm. Uh, they took over running the business and grew it. All of a sudden I'm working 15-hour days on this plumbing business, said Caroline, now 35, who managed a crew of nine as a flight naval officer. It was going well, but not well enough that you can light your high-paying consulting gig on fire. Caroline decided to buy a business to kickstart growth. She found one that they could finance with an SBA loan.

• 1:14:01Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:14:01John Coogan?

  These typically come with a lower interest rate than a bank loan and because they're but government-backed. Uh, they did have to personally guarantee the loan. Caroline also had to take out a life insurance policy. She, she bought the business for 1.8 times, uh, EBITDA, uh, for a tiny fraction of what most, uh, private equity firms pay. So not, not too bad to get that working.

• 1:14:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. You have to imagine it was very subscale.

• 1:14:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:22Jordi Hays?

  Otherwise.

• 1:14:23John Coogan?

  Working for someone younger than me and having to live life one PowerPoint slide at a time was torture, he said. I mean, he quit his consulting job. Anyway, uh, there's another interesting, uh, Google news. Uh, Google did a, they released this massive, massive study, I think it's like a hundred pages, um, about the impact of AI. And they have very, 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, uh, 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.

• 1:15:07Jordi Hays?

  If you use your own eyes and ears instead of reading, uh.

• 1:15:11John Coogan?

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

• 1:15:16Jordi Hays?

  You know.

• 1:15:16John Coogan?

  It's all over here.

• 1:15:18Jordi Hays?

  Then you know.

• 1:15:19John Coogan?

  Oh, what? Okay, cool. Um, 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, uh, one of the looming worries about artificial intelligence is that it will automate away jobs. This, uh, worry certainly has been looming. A report from researchers at Google released Thursday says that so far, the technology is mainly being used as an aid to workers. It's a yes and technology. It is finding, it, uh, it is a finding that if, 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.

• 1:16:01John Coogan?

  Said Google economist Scott Strand, one of the researchers. The stakes are high for Google parent Alphabet. Google operates Gemini, one of the most popular AI platforms. Public backlash to AI is intensifying with stark fears about job loss and anger over the build-out of data centers across the country. Some large corporations that have laid off employees, this was your point, uh, in the past year, have said that they were able to downsize because of AI, yet the US unemployment rate overall remains relatively low. And, oh, um, and, uh, the, uh, and economists remain split on whether the technology will ultimately eliminate jobs or simply make workers more productive. We can continue chatting about this in a minute, but let me tell you about CrowdStrike.

• 1:16:46John Coogan?

  Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Um, we are going to be adjusting our audio setup. I think we will be joined in just a few minutes. Are you, are you ditching yours? Are you going full, uh, are you going full, uh, full bandana for the interview? Is that what you're thinking? I don't know. Uh, anyway, um, I think we are.

• 1:17:11Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:17:22John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:17:23Jordi Hays?

  John, did you know?

• 1:17:25John Coogan?

  Cowboys.

• 1:17:26Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:17:30John Coogan?

  That's impossible.

• 1:17:32Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:17:37John Coogan?

  How is that possible? No one thought to put wheels on suitcases?

• 1:17:41Jordi Hays?

  This is Nassim Taleb.

• 1:17:43John Coogan?

  People were just like.

• 1:17:44Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:17:47John Coogan?

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

• 1:17:54Jordi Hays?

  If it can be done, we should do it.

• 1:17:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, we have.

• 1:17:57Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:17:58John Coogan?

  It's sort of a moonshot project. That is, 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 since before trees or something. That's one of those like, like brain teaser things.

• 1:18:16John Coogan?

  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 characterized the use of AI as shallow in most occupations. Workers are only using AI for a relatively small slice of the tasks they do. We were talking to Travis Kalanick about this yesterday. Truck driver, what's the job? Is it to drive the vehicle or is it also to protect the vehicle? Is it also to do small repairs on the vehicle? Handle logistics with the vehicle. Driving is just one of the tasks. And so even if you have a, 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

• 1:18:58John Coogan?

  task that people have been working on for 20 years now, and it's still not quite there. The other, the other interesting thing that you were asking Ajna about, what is the next leg up? What is the next thing that causes another order of magnitude boom in, in token consumption, basically, or like revenue or whatever metric you want to measure the AI boom through?

• 1:19:23John Coogan?

  And there are, there are just like diffusion elements, right? Where, you know, the number of people that are using coding agents is still small and, and you could just see diffusion that way, but there is.

• 1:19:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think there's some data, house, US households that pay for AI products is still well below two digits, more around 5%.

• 1:19:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I do think there, that.

• 1:19:48Jordi Hays?

  Part of, part of that is like, there's just a lot of households that are not going to pay for AI, at least directly.

• 1:19:55John Coogan?

  There, 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. You know, we're in this like reliable agent paradigm, but I think people might be undercounting what,

• 1:20:15John Coogan?

  you know, a willingness to run a prompt that will run for a week and give you a result. Like, we're not quite there, or maybe it needs to be more communicative. Maybe the system needs to get back and forth with you, but people just aren't. It's, it's, it's, 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, in 20 minutes, in at one hour increments. So.

• 1:20:42Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:20:46John Coogan?

  Who?

• 1:20:46Jordi Hays?

  Friend of the show, Mark Zuckerberg.

• 1:20:49John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah?

• 1:20:50Jordi Hays?

  Mark has launched a new campaign that is focused on AI optimism. In Axios Metasio, 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.

• 1:21:23John Coogan?

  I thought it was a cool video. I liked it. It's interesting to imagine watching it not as a fan of social media though, because it's leaning a lot on 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 don't, and they're like, oh, if you're going to do what you just did to the next thing, I'm not certainly, I'm not fully on board. So I don't know how it will be received.

• 1:21:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't, yeah, I don't know.

• 1:21:52John Coogan?

  Production value was fantastic. It's definitely the correct angle. The opposite is worse. Like clearly, like you want to be optimistic and there's a lot of data to show.

• 1:22:00Jordi Hays?

  I'm really glad he's not like memetically going down the fear-based path.

• 1:22:05John Coogan?

  Yes, that would be very, very rough.

• 1:22:07Jordi Hays?

  Working for some players.

• 1:22:11Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, so we'll, we'll see how it lands.

• 1:22:16Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:22:27John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:22:27Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:22:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I watched a true crime one and I, I felt like I was actually fine with the AI video and voiceover element of it. What I felt was missing was when you're, when you're tracking a true crime story and you turn on a podcast about that true crime, you know, whatever it was. I like being led through a meandering idea maze of what is interesting to that host. So maybe they find the, 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.

• 1:23:17John Coogan?

  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. So I, 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 going to get me. There's something about going to the theater. It's an experience. It's like, it's the anti-brain rot.

• 1:23:58Jordi Hays?

  What if, what if a theater were to turn the screen sideways?

• 1:24:01John Coogan?

  They've done that. They've done that. There's, there's, there's somebody in Brooklyn, I think, put together like a whole, like, we're going to watch Instagram reels together. Or like TikToks, 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 a breakthrough. Like where's my premiere? And like, maybe there should be a premiere for some, for the next season of Subway Takes, whenever that happens. I mean, it's also just the hard thing with, with social media shows is that there isn't really a, a season. It's just sort of always on. We sort of fake this with, what are you laughing at?

• 1:24:37Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 1:24:46John Coogan?

  You can imagine it gets pretty clickbaity in there. You can definitely imagine that.

• 1:24:51Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:24:59John Coogan?

  Potentially, potentially. Yeah. I do wonder where the line will be drawn. There's a whole new, there's a whole new class of problems that Apple will have to grapple with. I thought this hilarious.

• 1:25:15John Coogan?

  I thought this, this screenshot from Bar Epsilon was very funny where it's just, I couldn't solve the Reiman hypothesis. I couldn't solve the Hodge conjecture. I couldn't solve P versus NP. I couldn't solve Navier-Stokes. That's just every really, really challenging millennium prize or, or unsolvable math problem. We've been working on our own conjectures. We're, we're creating.

• 1:25:36Jordi Hays?

  Hayes, Cosgrove.

• 1:25:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, all the conjectures are solved.

• 1:25:40Jordi Hays?

  Well, I mean, we actually, we built it out, I think it was 2009.

• 1:25:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, I remember back in college.

• 1:25:45Jordi Hays?

  We've been letting it sit because we just didn't have the technology. We didn't have the capability.

• 1:25:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, we would have taken.

• 1:25:50Jordi Hays?

  We needed AI to, to advance.

• 1:25:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:52Jordi Hays?

  And I think we're going to be close to cracking it.

• 1:25:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:56Jordi Hays?

  But we should release the conjecture and let everybody kind of take their own shot at it.

• 1:25:59John Coogan?

  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 codex-y. People are speculating that it might be a cerebrus, a faster version of Seoul turbo mode. It is. Okay.

• 1:26:15Jordi Hays?

  ChatGPT Voice is now in the desktop app. Control your computer and direct multiple agents running in ChatGPT 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.

• 1:26:29John Coogan?

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

• 1:26:38Jordi Hays?

  What about AID sleep?

• 1:26:40John Coogan?

  Ooh, got to get it on there for sure. There's also a, 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, a longer conversation on a future show.

• 1:27:05Jordi Hays?

  Sheal Monat is sharing some interesting nuggets in an information article on Stripe, which we will be getting to.

• 1:27:14John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Cisco.

• 1:27:16Jordi Hays?

  Next episode.

• 1:27:17John Coogan?

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

• 1:27:34Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:27:36John Coogan?

  It is, it is. And 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. Thank you so much. Please grab a seat if you wouldn't mind putting that headset on. We will hear you loud and clear.

• 1:27:58John Coogan?

  How is today going?

• 1:28:00Speaker 06

  It is a fantastic day.

• 1:28:02John Coogan?

  Yes, what have been the highlights?

• 1:28:04Speaker 06

  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, so.

• 1:28:17John Coogan?

  Take us back to 2014. How is 2026 different?

• 1:28:22Jordi Hays?

  Just a little bit different.

• 1:28:23John Coogan?

  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?

• 1:28:40Speaker 06

  Well, I have to say, when I think about this entire arc, you know, 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. And 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, semiconductor has always been a fast paced environment. But the rate and pace of change of the adoption curve of AI

• 1:29:25Speaker 06

  and then how the technology is changing, and then frankly, how the ecosystem is changing, has us constantly on the, hey, we gotta go faster. I mean, that's the, 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. And you realize, man, we can even go faster. And that's what the market wants.

• 1:29:48Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 1:29:58Speaker 06

  Well, I view it as actually a really good thing. I mean, people ask me that from time to time. And, you know, the reason I view it as a good thing is, look, you know, we're in a place where everybody needs compute. Everybody wants compute, you know, every country wants compute. Every hyperscaler wants compute, you know, all of us are using it. And so it is not, you know, we're the, the components under covers. We're actually, you know, helping drive, you know, sort of how technology is being consumed. And so I think that's the difference, right? It's, it's much more front and center, you know, versus just something that only techies know about.

• 1:30:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. Culturally, how is, 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 of AMD?

• 1:30:57Speaker 06

  Well, I think I 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. And I'm not kidding, you know, our, our mantra, like our number, number one mantra is, you know, 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, that, that we're working so hard for.

• 1:31:37Speaker 06

  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. And 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, right? The world we're in today.

• 1:32:10Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:32:39Speaker 06

  Well, I would say what has been the foundation of AMD, you know, back to, you know, Jerry Sanders, our founder, has always been about pushing the envelope. And, you know, in some sense, being risk takers, you know, wanting to have the best roadmaps out there. That has always been the foundation of AMD. I 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,

• 1:33:24Speaker 06

  to have, you know, Tom Brown of Anthropic with us, you know, Santos of Meta, Sachin of OpenAI, you know, Jeremy at AT&T, G2 was here. And 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, you know, kind of, kind of see the future through the broad lens. And the way you do that is having, you know, great partners along the way. So that's very much, I think, the foundation of today's AMD, you know, culture.

• 1:34:03Jordi Hays?

  What were, what were some of the highlights of, 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?

• 1:34:16Speaker 06

  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, Claude has been incredibly, incredibly successful. And probably the highlight for me was, I think he told that story on stage about the MI355. And that's a very true story. It's a very true story.

• 1:34:44Jordi Hays?

  And you've been busy today, but that's what the internet's talking about.

• 1:34:47Speaker 06

  Is that right? Okay, I haven't seen that. I could tell you, a few months ago, my guys were like, hey, we think Anthropic is, is on 355s and they're doing work on it. And I'm like, okay, well, you know, 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 like, they're able to do it with Claude. And I'm like, wow.

• 1:35:08John Coogan?

  That's incredible.

• 1:35:09Speaker 06

  That's incredible. So I think he told you the, the story, but it's just a lot about how the ecosystem has evolved over time, right? I'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, you know, putting, you know, great technology out there. If we can reduce our time to market, you know, sort of 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, you know, Sachin say, like more compute faster.

• 1:35:52Speaker 06

  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, you know, able to, you know, put it all together. And that's where AI can be tremendously helpful on both hardware and software.

• 1:36:11John Coogan?

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

• 1:36:31Speaker 06

  Well, you know, I think the, the interesting thing is, you know, every so often you hear like, this is the killer chip.

• 1:36:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:40Speaker 06

  Right? You guys have heard like.

• 1:36:41Jordi Hays?

  You see that on the model side too.

• 1:36:43Speaker 06

  GPUs are going to take over the world.

• 1:36:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:36:45Speaker 06

  Like.

• 1:36:45John Coogan?

  Everything's going to be on this.

• 1:36:46Speaker 06

  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. Our 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.

• 1:37:30Speaker 06

  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 and 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. We 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.

• 1:38:14John Coogan?

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

• 1:38:54Speaker 06

  I think it is extremely important, like you said, because people access technology in different ways. You know, not everyone is going to a, you know, big cloud instance to experience AI. And so, you know, 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, you know, some of these other ways to access, you know, 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.

• 1:39:37Speaker 06

  So our Ryzen AI Max portfolio. I think physical AI is another place where, you know, we just launch these, you know, small robotics form factors so that people can experiment with it. So 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, you know, being in, you know, the largest frontier model companies. Or, you know, frankly, the amount of startups that are doing just amazing technology is fantastic. And we want to support those as well.

• 1:40:15Jordi Hays?

  On that, how do you think about long shot R and 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've, 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, how do you think about some of these investments in R and D that are maybe like higher risk, but high potential over the long run?

• 1:40:47Speaker 06

  Well, we are in a world where there is a long arc on R and D. Like, I really do like to say, you know, judge us on what we're doing today. The ideas were really thought of three to five years ago. So, chiplets, networking, optimization CPU and GPU, putting that together in Helios. I mean, that's really unfolded over the last, you know, three or four years. And today, you know, we're thinking about, you know, what's beyond the roadmap. And I think both are very important. So we do have a tremendous number of new ideas, no question. You know, very active research team.

• 1:41:27Speaker 06

  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? But I want to give credit where credit is due. There are a growing number of startups. It used to be that people only did software startups because hardware was too hard. It took too long.

• 1:41:59Jordi Hays?

  And now it's easy, so everyone's doing it.

• 1:42:02Speaker 06

  It is not easy.

• 1:42:04Jordi Hays?

  I'm joking.

• 1:42:05Speaker 06

  It is not easy, but it's appreciated. That's actually what I want to say. It's appreciated.

• 1:42:10Jordi Hays?

  And part of this, like, software singularity that it feels like in some ways we're already in, VCs are just, they feel like more confident underwriting risk on the hardware side.

• 1:42:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, 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. So my view is lots of good ideas out there. I think one of the things I pride myself on within AMD is we are quite, 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.

• 1:43:09Speaker 06

  You know, certainly I think a lot of people know Aneesh out there. So one of our, one of our acquisitions who is doing incredible job, trying to make sure that everyone who wants to use Rockem is going to get our support. But a number, you know, 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.

• 1:43:33John Coogan?

  Well, we know you're busy. Thank you so much.

• 1:43:34Jordi Hays?

  We have a gong here. We'd love for you to hit it.

• 1:43:37John Coogan?

  To commemorate the day.

• 1:43:40Speaker 06

  Do I get to do this?

• 1:43:40John Coogan?

  Please, as hard as you want.

• 1:43:45John Coogan?

  Thank you so much. And speaking of hardware companies.

• 1:43:48Jordi Hays?

  Consumer hardware.

• 1:43:49John Coogan?

  They're hard.

• 1:43:50Jordi Hays?

  With an AMD chip in it.

• 1:43:51John Coogan?

  We have an AMD-powered chromatic from Mod Retro, the M64. You want to sign right here next to AMD?

• 1:43:58Speaker 06

  Perfect.

• 1:43:59John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:44:00Speaker 06

  Is this one of yours or is this?

• 1:44:01John Coogan?

  It's Dylan's over there.

• 1:44:02Speaker 06

  Dylan, all right.

• 1:44:03Jordi Hays?

  But it's going in a museum.

• 1:44:05John Coogan?

  We're good friends with the team over there. We love, love just consumer hardware and all these things. So thank you for powering it.

• 1:44:11Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for coming on.

• 1:44:12John Coogan?

  For coming on the show and congratulations on everything.

• 1:44:14Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for having us.

• 1:44:15Speaker 06

  Thanks.

• 1:44:15John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Have a great day. And that's our show, folks. Thank you so much for tuning in to TBPN Live from AMD. We are traveling tomorrow. We'll be back on Monday, 11:00 AM 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.

• 1:44:36Jordi Hays?

  We're dialing in these IRL shows.

• 1:44:37John Coogan?

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

• 1:44:41Jordi Hays?

  The team makes it look easy.

• 1:44:42John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com. And we will see you on Monday, 11:00 AM sharp for another one. Goodbye.

• 1:44:52Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.