AMD’s Tech Was Used To Create Weta FX’s Oscar Winning Short “War is Over!”, CEO Lisa Su Talks AI

AMD's CEO, Lisa Su, was live at SXSW and talked a lot about AI plus its prospects on where the tech is now and where it is headed in the coming years.

There's no doubt that all major chip makers, AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, Apple, etc, are all onboard the AI hype train. The emerging AI PC segment is said to be a Kickstarter for the future of AI and while it holds big potential for the coming years, there's still a lot of work that needs to be done within the software side to make next-gen capabilities and enhanced personal assistance available to users. Dr. Lisa Su states that as the technology progresses and software gets better, the rate of adoption of AI PCs is going to increase.

SXSW: I like to see everyone have an AI PC, you know that's not going to happen this year but there's this whole opportunity over it will start this year, over next couple of years you will see it throughout product portfolios. I like to see everyone have access to all the knowledge that you can get from AI that comes from making our chips more capable over time and deeper partnerships.

CNBC: People really have a lot of personal data and the way you want to use your PC is that it is actually a personal productivity tool so what I see is that we are at the beginning of the era where we can make much much more capable personal assistance in the PC form factor.[...] As the technology gets better, I am absolutely sure that everyone's going to want an AI PC.

Lisa Su - AMD CEO

Talking about the use of AI and how the first thing to pop up in everyone's mind is that AI will be replacing people in the future, AMD's CEO states that's not how they believe AI will evolve in the future.

AI and creators of all kinds will co-exist and the great thing about AI is that it will be more of a personal assistant that's available to you 24/7, making you do work that took hours in just a couple of minutes. It is mentioned that companies that leverage AI will be the ones to really advance and push forward versus those that don't.

Even as of right now, companies like AMD and NVIDIA are using AI to make, design, and research next-generation chips.

One of the things that I like to say is that people are worried about AI that its going to replace jobs and stuff like that, that's not the way I think about it. I think that companies that learn to leverage AI are going to win over companies that are not leveraging AI so at AMD, we are going to be at the bleeding edge.

We are using AI through every aspect of our business, we are using it to design chips, we are using it to design faster chips, make them more reliable, make better software, make sure that it's really a productivity tool, and my goal, like I am telling my engineering team, I like to increase the number of products we can get out each year with the use of AI.

AI is not perfect, we are all learning along the way. I would say that I am personally learning so everyday, I am learning new things about what the technology can do and how do we need to shape our entire ecosystem and our work in our next-generation products as well so that's what makes it fun.

Lisa Su - AMD CEO

AMD also touched on its open-source nature and stated that the entire industry has to collaborate to move forward, whether that be AI or something else. Recently, AMD, Intel, Tenstorrent, and many others have fired back at NVIDIA and its CUDA ecosystem which has been the go-to standard for AI use cases. The rest of the companies haven't seen the same level of traction as NVIDIA due to its swift software stack releases and being onboard the AI bandwagon since its inception.

For these companies, replicating the success that NVIDIA has achieved with CUDA and its AI Software stack is going to be a huge effort we are simply in the early days of the evolution of the AI Segment so we will see what happens in the next few years and if we manage to see a more viable alternative or replacement to NVIDIA's behemoth, CUDA.

Right now, people are trying to get products to market as fast as possible. This industry is changing at a pace that I have never seen before in terms of just how fast things are going and as a result, you are going to be as productive as possible.

There are various ways to do that. Our approach, AMD's approach is to have an open-source ecosystem. We are huge huge supporters of the open source, we believe that there's no one company that has the answer to everything, we actually have to collaborate.

Lisa Su - AMD CEO

Next up, we had Weta FX's executive VFX producer, David Conley, at the SXSW stage joined by AMD CEO, Dr. Lisa Su. David mentioned how the world of VFX has rapidly progressed over the past few years and thanked AMD for its dedicated to high-performance computing which enabled the team at Weta FX to be awarded an Oscar for the animated short called War is Over!.

We won an Oscar for an animated short called War is Over!, songs inspired by John Lennon and Yoko Lennon and we did it entirely on AMD using real-time technologies to animate something that has never been done before.

30 years ago, Peter Jackson started a company, 1 computer, 8 people and did some work on it called Heavenly Creatures. Now we over 1800 people and hundreds and thousands of cores in computers and machines all over the world creating movies like Avatar 2 and you saw some sneak peek footage there of kingdom of the eight. These images are possible because there's a partnership with a company like AMD that gives us the leverage and the insights and they work with our teams and we work with their teams to optimize because a lot of this wouldn't be possible.

We would be rendering Avatar today if it wasn't for a lot of partners.

David Conley - Executive VFX Producer (Weta FX)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrcilSXWa8M

The animated short was made using AMD's technologies such as Ryzen Threadripper PRO CPUs and Radeon PRO GPUs which have become the standard for workstation users owing to their great performance capabilities and the ability to offer lots of cores with huge amounts of efficiency backing them up.

We use every bit of AMD and I mean every bit. As soon as it comes off the assembly line we are at the door knocking, can we use it. Secondly, I do want to talk about AI and I do want to talk about the future but I wanna acknowledge that the use of AI in in the entertainment industry is still a sensitive subject. A lot of people misunderstand it and don't really truly understand where AI can help us as a community but I also want to make sure that artists understand that AI is a tool and this is not about replacing artists.

Where I see things and where I am hoping to go is that we as an industry have moved from GPUs to GPUs and there's an intrinsic relationship between the types of technologies that AMD is working on. I am believing that the future of film-making is a partnership between passive entertainment and active entertainment and this is where we are going to see the intersection of games.

I know I heard a loud roar from all of you gamers out there so I wanna hear another one because gaming, visual effects and movie making is all the same and I wanna jump from video games to movies, I wanna go from active entertainment to passive entertainment, I wanna go into realtime entertainment and that is where films are going in 3-5 years. We are not going to be able to dot that without the help of companies like AMD where we get real-time processing and real-time rendering and a lot of AI is going to help us get to that place.

David Conley - Executive VFX Producer (Weta FX)

There's no doubt that AMD is one of the major players in the AI segment, they are the top three in the PC market and they have a strong roadmap for the AI PC and AI server segment planned out for the years ahead. The company will be giving an AI-fueled presentation at the opening keynote of Computex 2024 where we will get to hear more about their future endeavors.