Amid all of the ruckus around this year’s commencement, I was pleased to be able to attend the graduation address of Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD, who is herself part of the MIT community, and had some good things to say, about humanity, about AI, and about the future.
Su talked about her arrival at MIT in 1986, a time that, from today’s standpoint, was an analog age, before so much of what we are now accustomed to in terms of technology. But even then, students and faculty were hard at work on ground-breaking projects of their time, and one thing that Su really highlighted in her talk was that experience of hands-on experimentation, of building.
“MIT has this incredible way of pushing you further than you thought you could go,” she said. “You wrestled with the problem. You blew up a circuit or two. And then, somehow … the thing worked. And suddenly, you realized you could build something real. That’s when I started feeling like an engineer.”
In fact, Su explained, it was this type of work that eventually led her to the semiconductor industry, where she is now a prominent name. She talked about an early MIT project, making X-ray lithography mask blanks in building 39.
“I ran a bunch of experiments,” she said. “Most of them didn’t work the way we expected. So, we adjusted. And tried again. It was the coolest thing ever. For the first time, I wasn’t just learning about technology in a classroom. I was part of a team trying to discover something new. I remember thinking: wow, we can build things this small? Things tiny enough to fit on a die the size of a coin … but powerful enough to change the world. And that is when I fell in love with semiconductors.”
Personal Development
Another part of Su’s talk that I liked was about a deeply personal process, but one that seems to be sort of a common experience, in some ways. She talked about how a student becomes an expert, slowly, through incremental change. I’ll just use her words:
“Little by little, I went from a new grad student learning about the field…to someone doing original research and actually contributing something new to the field. And along the way, I started believing in myself. Not the confidence that I would always know the answer. But the confidence that even when I didn’t know the answer yet…I could figure it out.”
Part of what I like about this is Su’s economy of words to describe something big, something that takes time, and has nuance, and is an important type of self-discovery.
Confidence. It’s an important part of one’s journey.
“What I realize now is that MIT was teaching me something much bigger than semiconductor physics,” Su added.
Staying the Course
Here’s how Su referred to the MIT motto: “mens et manus,” or in English, “mind and hand.”
“When I was a student, I thought it was just a motto,” she said. “Now I think it captures exactly what makes MIT special. MIT teaches you to think deeply. But it also teaches you to build. To test ideas. To keep going when the first experiment — or even the fifth experiment — doesn’t work. And over time, you start believing you can solve problems that once felt impossible.”
Into the Fray
Another important part of Su’s address was where she talked about taking that MIT feeling, and bringing it into the work world, a place where personal confidence is often tested. That’s very much the case today, as new grads find themselves wondering what path to take in a stressed and competitive environment. But as Su contrasted the external challenges with the confidence and knowledge that an MIT grad takes with them, I could see how a good education can be a real asset.
“I carried that feeling with me long after I left campus,” Su said. “When I joined IBM, I found myself starting all over again. IBM had hundreds of thousands of employees. I was 25 years old, wondering how I could possibly make a difference in a company that big.”
Having said that, Su illustrated another idea that must occur to many of those who immerse themselves in the work of engineering and building.
“I learned something important very quickly: engineering doesn’t care how old you are. It cares whether your ideas work.”
I think that’s a good reminder for the work world, too. Any old rules that did exist are largely obsolete now. Age isn’t the metric. Nor, to a certain degree, is coding skill, or rote knowledge of networking systems, or all of that acumen that served a professional well in, say, the 1980s. We’re in another time now.
So I thought students could take something away from what Su had to say about tenacity.
Tackling the Future
“One of my mentors told me something that I’ve never forgotten:” Su said. “Run toward the hardest problems. At the time, I didn’t fully understand what that meant. But over time, I realized this was the best advice I ever received. Hard problems teach you what you’re capable of.”
I want to include a lot of Su’s actual words here, because I think she really did a good job of describing the career arc and the context of what she saw at AMD. First, there was the idea of a risk taken:
“AMD had enormous potential, but the company had been through some tough years,” she said. “Some of my mentors thought taking the job was risky. But for me, this was my dream job. This was what I’d been training for all those years. The opportunity to work at the bleeding edge of technology on problems that really mattered.”
So again, there’s that confidence built on experience, along with the desire to do groundbreaking important work.
Here’s how Su described the core initiative and how it bloomed:
“We made a long-term bet that high-performance computing would be the most important technology of the future. We gave our talented team the room to think big. Over the next several years, we built technology to enable the most powerful computers in the world.”
Again, this isn’t a long narrative: it shows you just the key aspects of making that bet and having it pay off. In today’s attention economy, being able to tell a story like this is a true skill.
The Individual and the Team
Here’s one more brief part of Su’s address where she talks about taking that individual confidence, and putting together a team that will explore big spaces together.
“Through all of it, I used every skill that MIT ever taught me … And then some,” she said. “I call it ‘the engineer’s instinct’ – the ability to face what seemed like an unsolvable problem, break it down, and methodically work through it step by step. But, at AMD, I learned something else. The engineer’s instinct is even more powerful when it becomes shared by a team, and the greatest satisfaction of my career has been bringing people together to do something more than any of us thought was possible.”
In the Days of AI
And then, of course, Su brought us up to today, where new grads are confronting a world that’s changing at a dizzying pace.
“Over the last few decades, we’ve experienced several major technology shifts,” Su said, adding:
“The internet changed how we communicate.
Mobile computing changed how we live.
Cloud computing changed how we work.”
And:
“Now we are at the beginning of the AI wave. To me, AI is different from those earlier technology waves. It is not just a tool that can help us do things faster. It is deeper than that. It has the potential to accelerate discovery in every field and help us solve problems we have never been able to solve before.”
Su invokes the value and the role of people in such a world:
“Technology itself does not decide what the future looks like,” she said. “People do. For all the promise of AI, it cannot decide which problems are worth solving. It cannot make the hard judgment calls with imperfect information. It cannot take responsibility for the outcome. These are our responsibilities. And they matter more now than ever.”
The Luck of the Bold
I want to close with something that Su said toward the end of her commencement address, which, of course, you can watch in its entirety on YouTube. It’s about fortune, and persistence, and that delicate math that drives human destiny.
“Over time, I’ve come to believe that the best people find ways to make their luck,” Su said. “Luck is not just being in the right place at the right time. It is taking the risk to work on something hard. It is challenging yourself. Choosing problems at the edge of what you know. Surrounding yourself with people who make you better. And believing that, yes … you can change the world. So be ambitious about the problems you choose. Run toward the hardest ones. And trust your engineer’s instinct. That is how you make your luck.”
If you weren’t there, watch the video. Some of these ideas may help you to make your way through uncertain times.
