You probably won't be surprised to learn that one of Lisa Su's main priorities is to make AMD the default choice for AI GPUs. If you're familiar with the all-business AMD CEO, it will likewise hardly be a revelation to find she's pragmatic about how and when AMD gets there. But what happens afterwards? Now, that's more intriguing.
In a new interview with Wired, Su is canvassed on a wide range of topics, inevitably including the impact and future trajectory of AI, chip tariffs, building silicon in the US and Starbucks. Su is nothing if not a canny operator, so you can't expect much by way of indiscretions when discussing AMD's operations.
In other words, if you were hoping for a push back on tariffs or bullish predictions about taking down Nvidia, you'll be disappointed. But has her future after the AMD project been ticked off? That's a subject for which Su is willing to willing to leverage her boxing training (she's had a personal boxing trainer for the last eight years) and pull fewer punches.
"One of the areas that I’m most personally passionate about is health care, because I have had experience with the health care system, and I think it should be much, much better than it is today," Su says, speaking of the years of treatment her now late mother experienced.
According to Su, the problem is the disjointed approach to healthcare. "The body is a very complex system. So you have specialists, like a heart specialist or a kidney specialist. But there are not that many generalists that can pull it all together, she says. "And that, to me, is a travesty."
Su thinks that stitching together all the disparate elements of healthcare, from drug discovery to therapeutics to inpatient care, "is a perfect use case for AI." Making sense of the complexity of healthcare is also something which she thinks will bend to her own expertise.
"That’s what we do in tech, right? We take complex systems and put them together, and we make them work. But we’re often only looking at one aspect of health, and it’s my firm belief that if we can use technology to help pull all of that expertise together, we’ll be able to treat people better," Su says.
However, she doesn't necessarily think we'll need AGI or "superintelligence" to achieve that. "We should be able to cure these diseases," she reckons, but adds, "I don’t know if you call that 'superintelligence.'"
In any case, Su is exactly the sort of person you'd want to be working on the healthcare problem, so it's a slight pity that we'll have to wait a while for her attention to move away from making AMD even more competitive. Healthcare is for her "next life," she says. "I have a few things to do right now."
But then a methodical, non-flashy approach has been something of a signature for Su during her stint at the helm of AMD. "When I first joined AMD in 2012, Microsoft was just an early partner for us in gaming. Over the past 10-plus years we’ve built a lot of trust, and now we’re cocreating with them, so Microsoft just announced they’re using AMD not only for their next-generation Xbox consoles but across their entire cloud," Su explains.
And she sees AMD's participation in the AI market and the inevitable comparison with currently dominant Nvidia in a similarly pragmatic light. "That’s where we are today in CPUs," she says when queried about whether she'd like AMD to be the first choice for AI GPUs for companies like OpenAI and Meta. "And absolutely, we expect to be there in AI as well. But I’m not impatient with this."
Personally, I wouldn't bet against Su getting there, sooner or later. Anyway, even if she doesn't drop any real bombshells about AMD's activities, Su's matter-of-fact takes on a wide range of subjects remain worth a read. Tariffs? They're a "fact of life." Politics? "You won’t see me weighing in on general social issues, because I don’t necessarily think that that’s where my value-add is." You don't have to agree with everything Lisa Su says, then. But the absence of hyperbole is certainly refreshing.
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