No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:03:07 · Lip-Bu Tan
[00:03:07] S0: Yeah. I just passed fourteen months. A lot of things happened in this fourteen months. So a couple of things. One is to change the culture and then clearly want to drive more accountability. And also in terms of decision making, had to be faster. You know, I'm so used to startup culture, and you move fast in the speed of light and going to have that bureaucracy layer of layer of meeting. And so something that I change accountability, listened to the customer, and the customer delighted. Someone like Lipo, so humble, willing to listen, and then address some of the problem that they face, and then try to delight the customer. And also the other part, from day one, I decided all the engineering report to me. Being an engineer by training, I want to know what went wrong and what are the things that I need to correct, listen to the customer, and delight the customer, and then make sure that we have the right product, simplify our product line, and really have the road map and the vision for the next five, ten years. What is your vision of where Intel should be in ten years? Yeah. I think a couple of things. One, I always believed in when I was at Cadence and also at Intel is, first of all, you crawl and then be humble, listen to customer. And then secondly, you're starting to walk. And then finally, you're starting to run-in sprint. So that's kind of my culture of step by step doing it. And then first step for me is to strengthen my balance sheets. And the balance sheet is really horrible in some way, so I'm delighted. You US government become a big shareholder. Just I explained to president Trump, TSMC, when they started, they have the Taiwan government as a shareholder. If you look at Japan, look at Singapore, this is the infrastructure US government get to provide the support. Secondly, very happy that Jensen Huang, my all time friend, he also put $5,000,000,000 in investing and support me, and I'm glad I at least do some good work. His $5,000,000,000 become $25,000,000,000 now and or more. And then the other part is SoftBank Master. I used to be at SoftBank Board, and then he lent a hand to help me. So we strengthened the balance sheet and then focused on the products. And I really simplified the product, listened to the customer, and then drive the next generation leadership products. And then in some ways, very lucky.
00:05:35 · Lip-Bu Tan
Right now, the AgenTeq AI and Influence CPU become highly in demand. And so versus one to eight in the training CPU to GPU, now I can see one to four, maybe one to one, and I'm delighted CPU become important. I talked to some of the AI model and developer, and they said, well, in terms of reinforced learning, in terms of the speed of orchestrating all the agents, and turn up the CPU is actually is better. And so in some way, I'm happy. Right now, the demand is very high for my CPU. So I think overall, build on the product, on the data center server side. Then the other part is our foundry business. And initially, this is a capital intensive business, and it's not easy. And you really need to have a couple of things. You need to have all the right IP so that you can support the customer. Like for example, if it is mobile related, you've got to have low power IP set that you need to have. Without that, you cannot serve them. It's a service business. It's a trust business. If people want to give you orders to have wafer to come, if the yield not good, they will be close in terms of revenue miss. So with that, I think it's very important to really focus on the yield, the defect density, the cycle time, and then make sure that you're really able to meet and serve the customer in high quality and reliable. And so those are the things that I really focus on it. And eventually, you have to really move into a full stack. So not just a silicon, you need to have a software. And some of the customer asked me, give me the whole rack. So there's a system that you have to build. And so I think those are the things that are quietly building step by step and recruit some of the best talent I can find. By the way, all the recruitment, I do it myself. No search firm helping. And so I think sometimes it's good to have a rode deck that you know who to reach out to call for.
00:07:33 · Elad Gil, Lip-Bu Tan
[00:07:33] S2: Yeah. I mean, you've been in the business for so long and, you know, you've you've run Cadence for, I think, twelve years before this. And so [00:07:39] S0: Thirteen years. Thirteen years. Sorry. Oh, yeah. Sorry. Didn't more years as executive chairman. So fifteen years. Fifteen years. So I signed up for three months Three months, so right now, I'd be very careful. The moment you said, I'll just do it for three months, it turned out to be fifteen years. [00:07:53] S2: Yeah. Well, it seems like you have a lot of longevity ahead of you here as well. And so the other big initiative that has been sort of talked about is TeraFab and working with Elon Musk on that. Can you tell us a bit more about how that came together and then your involvement and how you all are collaborating?
00:07:53 · Elad Gil, Lip-Bu Tan
[00:07:53] S2: Yeah. Well, it seems like you have a lot of longevity ahead of you here as well. And so the other big initiative that has been sort of talked about is TeraFab and working with Elon Musk on that. Can you tell us a bit more about how that came together and then your involvement and how you all are collaborating? [00:08:06] S0: Yeah. Good. I mean, Elon Musk, I think we all agree, is one of the best, if not the best, entrepreneur in this century. He and I, we share the same view that semiconductor infrastructure actually is not catch up with the AI growth. And in terms of you need the capacity, you need to have the productivity, and you have to drive efficiency. And so those are the things that he and I, we share that there's something missing. And then secondly, it's just delighted to work with him and he's very, I call it unconventional. And he basically questioned every step and why this traditional way of doing things. And in some ways, it's very refreshing. And I like that. You know, I like people who have different opinion, and let's work together, find what is the best route, and we both gonna learn a lot together. And then I think clearly he have a vision that his robots and his car, you know, he need a lot of silicon. [00:09:05] S2: Yeah. Could you actually explain what TeraFab is for people who aren't familiar with it?
00:09:05 · Elad Gil, Lip-Bu Tan
[00:09:05] S2: Yeah. Could you actually explain what TeraFab is for people who aren't familiar with it? [00:09:08] S0: Yeah. TeraFab, he decided he want to build his own fab. And then meanwhile, we are delighted to work with him and then make sure that we can work together and enable him to be faster and quicker to the production and then using some of our technology and some of our process. And that's something that we both kind of collaborate together. And he's a very good team that I work with weekly, and it's just refreshing to work with him. [00:09:32] S2: And he's talked about things like he wants you to be able to smoke inside the clean room and all these things that normally are considered. Asleep. [00:09:39] S0: Think I don't go that far. Maybe some part of the clean room, you can do that. But I think something that is an open mind, and then we'll also listen and see whether we can do that. Yeah. I mean,
00:09:50 · Elad Gil
[00:09:50] S2: it's very exciting to see how you're morphing the business here in The US in terms of incrementally building out the Foundry business, in terms of collaborating with things like TeraFab. If you think about the global AI and semiconductor supply chain, so say that you were to look at the changes that AI is driving on a macro basis country by country. And if I look at certain countries, when I look at the layoffs that are claimed from AI, for example, most of them, I think, are overstated right now. You know, most of layoffs are actually just over hiring during 2020 COVID period. COVID period. But the first things I see actually being cut are outsourced firms, where you'd rather cut external headcount versus internal. So you're cutting external customer support. You're cutting external IT. And that has more of an impact, I think, for certain countries which have big BPOs, The Philippines, India, etcetera. And so they may be impacted in the short run by AI. Then And if you ask how do companies participate in the future in a positive way in AI, you have to almost go country by country. Right? Places with cheap energy will do data centers. Places with the ability to train models will train models, but it's probably only The US and one or two other places. How do you think about the the shift in global supply chain for the semiconductor industry? Should certain countries invest more? Like, should Israel be doing more given Melanix and NVIDIA and Intel presence there, and should they try to do more in semiconductors? Should other Should The Philippines move back to more of a manufacturing base? How do