While an AMD spokesperson says the move was strictly a hiring and not an acquisition, it continued the chip designer’s AI talent grab that has been boosted by several acquisitions it has made over the past three years to boost its rivalry with Nvidia.
AMD continued its AI talent grab Wednesday with the announcement that it has hired the team behind an early ISV supporter of its Instinct GPUs.
Sharon Zhou, co-founder and CEO of generative AI startup Lamini, said on X that she and several employees are joining the chip designer.
[Related: Analysis: Nvidia Vs. Intel Vs. AMD Q1 Earnings Face-Off]
An AMD spokesperson told CRN that the move was strictly a hiring and did not represent an acquisition of the team in the same way that it did with AI chip startup Untether AI, which the company confirmed last week.
With her new title of vice president of AI, Zhou said she will pursue AI research and teaching while working closely with Vamsi Boppana, vice president of AMD’s AI group, as well as company executives Ramine Roane and Anush Elangovan.
Prior to starting Lamini in 2022, Zhou held several roles, including as an adjunct computer science faculty at Stanford University, where she got her Ph.D. in computer science while she was advised by Google Deep Brain founder Andrew Ng.
She also worked as a machine learning product manager at Google and as a product manager at AI startups Kensho Technologies and Tamr.
The move was announced a day before AMD is expected to ramp up its competition against Nvidia with the reveal of next-generation Instinct GPUs, including the MI400 slated for release next year, among other things. These efforts have been boosted by several acquisitions AMD has made over the past three years, including three from the past month.
While most of the acquisitions have been made to boost AMD’s AI software and hardware offerings, they have also helped the company expand the AI expertise of its workforce.
Zhou and AMD did not say how this move would affect Lamini, which the chip designer first highlighted in 2023 as an early ISV supporter of its Instinct GPUs.
Founded by Zhou and former Nvidia CUDA software architect Greg Diamos, Lamini’s platform allowed enterprises to fine-tune and customize LLMs into private models using proprietary data.
Diamos, who was previously an AMD fellow who worked on enabling LLM systems to run on Instinct GPUs, left Lamini in 2024, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Lamini announced in September of 2023 that it had been “secretly running on more than 100” Instinct MI200 series GPUs and found that AMD’s ROCm software platform had “achieved software parity” with Nvidia’s CUDA platform.
The startup went on to raise a $25 million funding round last year from several investors, including the venture arm of AMD, Andrew Ng, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston and Lip-Bu Tan, who became Intel’s CEO earlier this year.
