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.
Intel is in trouble, it's not clear how or if they'll be able to get out of the hole they're in. Their only saving grace is natsec concerns and even that may not be enough to save them. I was hoping Gelsinger would be able to do it, but it was too late.
You can tell from the tone of this letter and the bizarre reference to agenetic AI he is completely clueless.
It's not a "bizarre reference to agentic AI" - it's saying (as you point out) that Intel can't compete in the training (i.e. "compile time") race, but they can in the inference (i.e. "run time") race, which is likely where more spending is going to be anyway in the near/medium future as the scaling hype looks like a dead end.
Except flight simulators. They're great as long as they have realistic physics.
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!
Even in this letter he says he's going to be reviewing major chip designs before tape out. JFC...
I stopped playing video games after a stint at a popular video game company, where I realized that the purpose of the company was basically to trap teenagers in a box, like rats, and watch them try to get out.
Flight sims are about all I can be bothered to invest in, time-wise these days. Oh, and I love my retro- collection. I frequently find myself MAME'ing out, just for the nostalgia. Crazy Climber and Scramble and Juno First and Defender, in case you're wondering.
Synthesizers, on the other hand - I just can't get enough.
Not all nerds are gamers. Some of us are knob tweakers too.
I'm quite fascinated by the huge overlap of flight enthusiasts and computer nerds. Any discussion on HN even tangentially involving flight will have at least one thread discussing details of aviation. Why planes, and not cars or coffee machines or urban planning?
I honestly wish I had more time to play different games.