Speed is the moat | AMD’s Anush Elangovan

**Andrew Zigler** (0:06)
Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Andrew Zigler.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:10)
And I'm your host, Ben Lloyd Pearson.

**Andrew Zigler** (0:12)
This week, I'm joined by Anush Elangovan, VP of AI Software, AMD. He joins the show to discuss why the dominant walled garden strategy for AI compute isn't the only path to innovation. Instead, AMD is betting on its open-source software stack, ROCm, with Anush explaining his philosophy that speed is the mode. Arguing that true speed isn't just about hardware benchmarks, but building the muscle to run the race for the long time. Something he believes only an open-source ecosystem can sustain. But first, let's discuss some of the news that caught our attention this week. Got a fun little lineup today, Ben. What do you want to talk about first?

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:53)
Our producer, Adam, has picked a really wonderful story about open-source, and FFMPEG and Google. So let's dive into that one first.

**Andrew Zigler** (0:59)
Yes. So this article on the news stack by Stephen von Nichols is about FFMPEG's open-source library being in a pinch with Google. To sum it up, basically, FFMPEG developers are demanding that Google demand financial support or stop sending security vulnerabilities in the excess amounts that they do. It really what it highlights is the strain that these open-source contributors that often work with no compensation on an entirely volunteer basis, the work that they do to sustain large enterprises and their software stack. So this confrontation, it was pretty public. FFMPEG powers every kind of video you could possibly imagine on the web, is an incredibly vital and integral open-source library that powers the world that we take for granted. A lot of businesses and products are built upon it, including many of Google's own. So there's a real tension here because we're talking about open-source contributors who own their code, own their process, own their stack. They're not partners, right? With Google, they are independent operators. So where do the incentives come from? It's a really fascinating play that we constantly see between large businesses and open-source. This isn't the first time we've seen it. You know, I think Ben, there were some things that caught your attention in this article as well.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (2:18)
Yeah, well in particular, you know, this hits home for me because I know a lot of the people in this story. So it's pretty interesting. But in particular, the article references a tweet from Mark Atwood, who used to work at AWS. He's a friend of mine and this tweet said, they're not a vendor, there's no NDA, we have no leverage, if your VP has refused to fund them, they could kill three major product lines tomorrow. Like that is how important FFMPEG is to many of these organizations. And I love that while I was reading some of the threads on X around this, I love to see that someone already beat me to making an FFMPEG version of the classic XK CD comic about the entire multimedia infrastructure of the world, depending on the hobbyists who maintain FFMPEG.

**Andrew Zigler** (3:09)
It's pretty crazy.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (3:10)
Yeah. And for people who don't know what it is, basically if you do anything that involves displaying video or listening to sound, there's a very high chance that FFMPEG is a critical component of that pipeline. It's an incredible tool, has a really special place in my heart. I was involved with it back about a decade ago when I was at Samsung. And I worked with many of the maintainers on the FFMPEG project. And here's the thing about open source in enterprise. There's a right way and there's a wrong way to interact with these communities. The right way is doing things like providing financial incentives or hiring someone to be your representative in the community who actively improves things on your behalf. That was the approach we took at Samsung. And it was how the company ensured that they had adequate representation in these super critical projects like FFMPEG. And then of course, there's the wrong way where you just dump all of your concerns as a high priority item on a team of volunteers and hobbyists. So yeah, I think this is kind of a classic story.

**Andrew Zigler** (4:12)
Yeah, you know, I really like how this article called out the CVE slop phenomenon that's been on a lot of open source projects. And this is kind of like a parallel to the PR slop problem that happened. You know, once open source contributors were getting being slammed with PRs from AI tools and AI agents and people using AI for the first time, especially in settings like Hacktoberfest, which had the drastically change how its rules work in order to accommodate this post AI developer world. The same thing happens in cyber security with CVEs, you know, as they're discovered en masse by AI systems and then also trying to find solutions for them to resolve bug bounties, right? There's a real financial loop involved with security on CVEs. So I really like how this article called that out as a phenomenon that's also burdening systems like FFMPEG. And I know what you're thinking at this point, like, okay, it's an open source project. It's really important.