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[return to "Intel CEO Letter to Employees"]
1. iamlep+4f[view] [source] 2025-07-24 22:07:30
>>fancy_+(OP)
You can tell from the tone of this letter and the bizarre reference to agenetic AI he is completely clueless. Compare this to someone like Jensen, a nerd's nerd who gets up on stage with the latest GPU, can talk about new CUDA API's and goes deep on specs like memory bandwidth. He knows exactly who his customer is, and what kinds of workloads they run for AI.

It's just such a massive difference. You can tell Lip-Bu spends his weekends playing golf while Jensen is checking out the latest model from Huggingface.

You can't buy passion or genuine interest in what you're doing.

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2. hackab+v01[view] [source] 2025-07-25 05:26:59
>>iamlep+4f
> You can tell

For those of us who cannot tell, what are the clues?

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3. Maro+l31[view] [source] 2025-07-25 05:59:56
>>hackab+v01
As somebody who works at a large company that routinely uses McKinsey to "set strategy" and "operating model", phrases and actual ideas overlap 100%, even though we are in a completely different business, in a completely different geography.

1. "Q2 2025 revenue above guidance" - Start with fake good news about good Q2 results. Fake because it's baselining on "guidance", which is already low since Wall Street knows Intel is in deep trouble. MBA/Finance types often cherry-pick some (semi-cooked) top-level finance number for good news, even though the whole email is about admitting the company is in deep trouble, announcing layoffs, etc.

2. "We are making hard but necessary decisions to streamline the organization..." - not hard for him, but the people losing their jobs!

3. "We are also on track to implement our return-to-office policy in September" - contract this with later comments about improving culture and empowering engineers!

4. "drive organizational effectiveness and transform our culture" - large companies with ~100k employees don't change their culture, but CEOs love to pretend so. To CEOs, transforming culture usually means making some reporting line changes, directing HR to do do some surveys and "listening sessions", firing teams with low NPS scores and thus forcing people to up their scores on subsequent surveys, and then a few months later declaring victory.

5. "We will eliminate bureaucracy and empower engineers to innovate with greater speed and focus." - for example, by forcing them back to the office? Nothing in this emil indicates actual empowerment.

6. "Strategic Pillars of Growth" - typical MBA speak.

7. "We remain deeply committed to investing in the U.S." ... "To that end, we are further slowing construction in Ohio" - great example of executive double-speak.

8. If you actually parse what this is saying, it's essentially about layoffs, cost-cutting, stopping some investment projects, RTO, and "doubling down" on existing projects like 18A and 14A. No trace of innovation in organizational culture, product design, etc.

9. "I have instituted a policy where every major chip design is reviewed and approved by me before tape-out. This discipline will improve our execution and reduce development costs." - we are improving culture by stating that only the MBA-speak CEO can make good decisions about chip designs, the other 74,999 people are idiots who slow down execution and improve costs!

10. If you look at the "Refine our AI Strategy", it's short and only has obvious things, like "will concentrate our efforts on areas we can disrupt and differentiate, like inference and agentic AI". There is no information here, because of course Intel already lost to Nvidia on training/GPUs, so training isn't a good focus area. But it's pretty shocking that in 2025 there is no actual ideas for what Intel could do in the AI space!

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4. HDThor+sT1[view] [source] 2025-07-25 14:02:06
>>Maro+l31
Youre expe3cting their CEO to speak like a founder when he isnt one. Corporate speak is unavoidable in these roles, it doesnt mean he is aloof.
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