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.
It's one reason why founders matter so much and why founder led companies often have better outcomes.
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.
Agree and I really appreciate your comment, as it wasn't immediately clear to me from reading the letter.
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.
The heck would you know? LBT studied physics and did a masters in nuclear engineering at MIT, he then started but left a PhD in that subject at MIT. He's not some clueless management scrub.
Even in this letter he says he's going to be reviewing major chip designs before tape out. JFC...
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!
If Jensen was that much of a nerd, he wouldn't be into AI grifting, but would be excited about games. He's into AI because he's a businessman, not a nerd.
If there's one thing I've learned in my 48 years of nerding out, it's that all of us are into games. If you're not into games, you're not a nerd. Seems simple.
I dunno. I can build a CPU from a bucket of transistors, design an ISA for it, microcode it, and write an OS for it in assembler. But games bore the shit out of me.
Except flight simulators. They're great as long as they have realistic physics.
The older I got, the more games just seemed like pointless wastes of time. Makes me sad to think back on how much time I wasted. I still fire up an old game or emulator out of nostalgia occasionally, but the time before I turn it off gets shorter and shorter.
Same. I grew up with computers. I wrote games on my Oric like my life depended on it (well, it was because that was the only way to get any games on the Oric..)
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 in my mid 50s and don't agree. Maybe they were for you, but I have many fond memories of games and gaming. There is a balance, of course, and maybe you spent way more time than I did, but even now I think they can be a great thing to do. All the fantasy/sci-fi reading I did? I kind of regret that time though. Definitely regret most of the time I spent just channel surfacing back in the "corded" TV days.
I honestly wish I had more time to play different games.
You ten years ago were not you today. I’ve played a ton of games when I was younger and I firmly believe at least some of them were helpful in life and it was passion for games that got me into IT and software engineering in the first place.
> Except flight simulators. They're great as long as they have realistic physics.
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?
Funnily enough there are multiple games where you do logic design now. Though if I had to recommend one game for you to try, it would have to be Factorio.
As a gamer, I'm really looking forward to how devs will integrate AI into future games. I want immersive NPCs that don't repeat the same lines over and over.
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.