All software is an optimization of tokens and time (and speed is still the moat) | AMD’s Anush Elangovan

**Andrew Ziegler** (0:05)
I'm super excited to kick this off. So, we're back, and joining me today is Anush Elangovan, VP of AI Software at AMD. And Anush, it's only been about six months or so since you were last on the show, but in the world of AI, that genuinely feels like a decade or two.
And last time we talked about how speed is the moat. That was the thesis we walked away from with our conversation with you, and the importance of AMD's open-source Rockum stack driving all of that. But since then, the industry has certainly evolved, and we're talking about a lot of things in orchestrating and delivering agents at scale. And hardware is still a fundamental part of that, but it's part of a bigger and more complex puzzle. So we're seeing a fundamental shift underneath with the folks that are utilizing and making the technology possible. A shift towards this agentic AI world. Like six months ago, when we talked, people were barely orchestrating. And now GitHub can barely stay online. So Anush, I'm so excited to dive into how the landscape is evolving, what your perspective on it is, and how AMD is rising to meet the occasion. So Anush, welcome back.

**Anush Elangovan** (1:20)
Yeah. Thanks for having me, Andrew. This is exciting. Yeah. I mean, six months ago, I think I probably thought agents were like prompts in a cron job, right? Like it's just a periodic, you're just prompting something and it's giving you some information. But in the past three months, it's kind of like evolved, my thought process has evolved to kind of like really understand what agents are and how agent-ic workflows are changing like software development life cycles. And the part with AMD and ROKM specifically is that ROKM is not just powering like 8 of 10 labs, etc., but it's now agent-ic AI is being used to rewrite ROKM itself, right? Like it's like a self-improving loop because ROKM is fully open source, and being fully open source, it is natively built into frontier models, right? And being natively built into frontier models, models know our hardware specifications, they know our software.
And so the improvement is a flywheel that is just like, you know, kicking off that now is going to become, you know, picking up the pace and picking up more RPM, if you will.

**Andrew Ziegler** (2:34)
Yeah, absolutely.
It sounds like the open source world has enabled this kind of autonomously driven kind of development. We've seen this across a lot of places in the industry. We've talked about the rise of these like software factories, these autonomously driven software groups, open source software that flips some of the perspective on its head and might just be a solo maintainer with a huge army of agents and people are coming in with ideas that are going through a very strict gate for like, does this need to go in or not? So like, I totally know what you mean. It's like the shape of everything that we're making is evolving. But more importantly than ever, people are trying to do it at scale and safely and securely as well. And so, you know, all of that comes down to having a good, solid platform to build on, an ecosystem to partner with, right? And that's what Rockum, I think, is really all about. And like, what do you think has been like the most profound change that you've seen with teams that embrace this same kind of like open world, open methodology as you, or that come to the table with you? Like, how has that helped both of y'all, you know, raise everybody's ships? What are some standout moments?

**Anush Elangovan** (3:47)
Yeah, so I think the ability for small number of people to have outsize impact has just like, you know, has just started to like take off in the past few weeks, months, right? So we are seeing, you know, like you said, like the, I'd phrase this in a, in a, like I call it the K transformation of like software engineering. There's like a bunch of folks that go in the upper arm, that just have just taken off, right? They've become identically enabled, they're multi-agent, and they're generating tens and tens, hundreds and thousands of lines of code per week. And then we have the folks that are just on the cusp of like learning what it is, and we need to like upskill and bring them in. But the folks that are taking off are just like, their wingspan has increased so much. And add that to, you know, like sub-agents that are just autonomously crunching through the night. There are people that are orchestrating what used to take like months and years of effort by large teams, with just like one person, right? It's just one person is poking the right buttons, and then it's just like the agents are running by itself. And this is super, super exciting because for AMD, you know, we had a journey of like, you know, where we came from, you know, providing board support packages, et cetera, to like a ROKM interface, you know, when ROKM was launched 10 years ago, it had a journey of like, you know, growing up. And the past two, three years, we had invested heavily in getting that ROKM interface be like, you know, it ships, it builds and ships like a solid first class software product.