#324 Sharon Zhou: Inside AMD’s Plan to Build Self-Improving AI

AI is not just getting smarter. It is getting faster by learning how to optimize the hardware it runs on.

In this episode, Sharon Zhou, VP of AI at AMD and former Stanford AI researcher, explains how language models are beginning to write and optimize their own GPU kernel code. We explore what self improving AI actually means, how reinforcement learning is used in post training, and why kernel optimization could be one of the most overlooked scaling levers in modern AI.

Sharon breaks down how GPU efficiency impacts the cost of training and inference, why catastrophic forgetting remains a challenge in continual learning, and how verifiable rewards from hardware profiling can help models improve themselves. The conversation also dives into compute economics, synthetic data, RLHF, and why infrastructure may define the next phase of AI progress.

If you want to understand where AI scaling is really happening beyond bigger models and more data, this episode goes under the hood.


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(00:00) Preview and Intro

(00:25) Sharon Zhou’s Background and Transition to AMD

(02:00) What Is Self-Improving AI?

(04:16) What Is a GPU Kernel and Why It Matters

(07:01) Using AI Agents and Evolutionary Strategies to Write Kernels

(11:31) Just-In-Time Optimization and Continual Learning

(13:59) Self-Improving AI at the Infrastructure Layer

(16:15) Synthetic Data and Models Generating Their Own Training Data

(20:48) AMD’s AI Strategy: Research Meets Product

(23:22) Inside the NeurIPS Tutorial on AI-Generated Kernels

(30:59) Reinforcement Learning Beyond RLHF

(39:09) 10x Faster Kernels vs 10x More Compute

(41:50) Will Efficiency Reduce Chip Demand?

(42:18) Beyond Language Models: Diffusion, JEPA, and Robotics

(45:34) Educating the Next Generation of AI Builders