AMD + HP "AI CREATE" Sydney Event - AI for Creators, For the Future

Introduction

AMD recently held an event in Sydney, Australia, hosting some of the Australian media and people from the creative world, and TweakTown was invited to the event. I flew from Adelaide to Sydney for the AI CREATE event, teasing us to dream bigger and create bigger.

We'll go into this article in a blog-style way, as there wasn't too much at the event worth writing home about, so I will explain what the event was, who it was for, what I took away from it, some of the conversations I had with people from AMD, Microsoft, other media outlets and YouTubers, as well as people from the creative side of things.

28

AMD hosted the event alongside HP, Microsoft, and Blackmagic Design with people from each of the companies, and some content creators and a mix of other people. I landed in Sydney, headed to my hotel to get ready, and then it was downstairs and into another Uber to get to the event. The above photo is what we were greeted with, a huge pink doorway that led into the event.

Best Deals: HP EliteBook 845 Business Laptop

	Today	7 days ago	30 days ago
	Loading...	Loading...	Loading...	Buy
* Prices last scanned on 12/10/2024 at 9:23 am CST - prices may not be accurate, click links above for the latest price. We may earn an affiliate commission from any sales.

AI CREATE: Demo Stations

28

I stood around and caught up with some friends at AMD that I haven't seen in a while (since the Computex 2023 party when I was there a couple of years ago) and some YouTuber friends I haven't seen since that same Computex (Gear Seekers, if you wanted to know, very cool couple). After a nice cold, refreshing beer and catching up with everyone, we were split into two groups that were led to demo stations that were either side of the stage).

28

At the demo stations were HP laptops powered by AMD hardware, with Topaz Labs showing a side-by-side of what they said was an older video shot in 240p, being upscaled using AI to a higher resolution. It sounds nice, but personally -- and I did talk to other media and creatives after the event -- it felt like that particular video was shot in 4K, downsampled to a crappier resolution like 240p, and then "upscaled with the power of AI" to its original resolution. It looks like magic, and the video that was shot was too new to be shot on an older camera at 240p, but I digress.

28

Moving over to another demo station and another AMD-powered HP laptop, this time using DaVinci Resolve that was applying effects and tweaks to a person's face in a video, a nice touch for creators (that want to use AI tools to speed up their workflows).

28

The demos didn't impress me much at all, but I did dig the presentation (even if it did feel too long, or maybe that was my butt on the uncomfortable chair). I actually commend AMD here, as the company truly has multiple firsts in the AI field. It has chips and processors inside the cloud, healthcare, industrial, automotive, connectivity, PCs, gaming (consoles), and AI.

AI CREATE: Once More, With Feeling (Well, Decks)

28

AMD says AI is the most transformational technology in the last 50 years, and I agree. Do we have absolute proof of that outside chatbots and making images with text input?

Not really, but it doesn't mean AI is absolutely useless... I think it is very under-utilized now, with NPUs almost useless (for most, 95%+ right now). Things will change in 2025, offloading tasks to the NPU on a processor... but not everyone has an NPU.

Aaaand we're off. AMD talks about the AI PC, with Ryzen AI being "The Power of Dreams." Ryzen AI and its built-in NPU (Neural Processing Unit) are built for creativity, productivity, and gaming. Yeah, it's here for creativity and productivity, but most gamers aren't using AI right now.

28

AMD talked about the evolution of the AI PC, covering the first-gen and second-gen AMD AI PC processors, with the Ryzen 7040 series APUs featuring 10 TOPS of AI performance, and the Ryzen 8040 series with up to 16 TOPS of AI performance. But it was the new third-gen Ryzen AI 300 series "Strix Point" APUs and their huge (up to) 50 TOPS of AI processing power from the NPU is impressive to see.

The first- and second-gen AI PC processors from AMD offering top-tier generative AI experiences on the cloud, as well as a bunch of local AI experiences. But, the new Strix Point APU offers transformative AI experiences that are built directly into Windows, running both locally on device, and over the cloud.

28

AMD has its head in the clouds (pun intended) with dreams of "unprecedented transformational experiences," which is something I feel like Steve Jobs said in an Apple speech years ago. The company says next-gen AI PCs will offer immersive collaboration, revolutionary creation, and editing. AI will reshape gaming and entertainment, be a personal AI assistant, and increase enterprise productivity.

AMD's new Ryzen AI 300 series "Strix Point" APUs are the world's best processor for Copilot+ PCs, with powerful Zen 5 processing cores, the XDNA 2-based NPU, and RDNA 3.5-based integrated graphics which I covered in a review of the ASUS Zenbook S16 OLED laptop which featured the Strix Point APU, you can read more about that here.

28

AMD sees the future of AI powering science and technology with advanced robotics, the healthcare industry with an AI-based exoskeleton, and the automotive industry with an AI companion.

After the keynote-style speech for AI CREATE, representatives from AMD, Microsoft, and HP took the stage for a rather lengthy but fun chat. You can watch that video in full above.

Post-Keynote Thoughts + Dinner + AI Discussion With Media

I wasn't the only one that thought this keynote-style speech was longer than it should've been, but it also wasn't completely boring either. It was actually refreshing to hear the different speakers talk about the good that AI will do... but some of the bad that AI will also do. We're being told that AI won't replace jobs (in content creation, video editing, writing, and more) but we all know that is (and is already) going to happen.

I chatted with a few people in the media, and they mostly agreed: what we saw was good, it was far too long, and it was more of the "here's AI, and here's how magical it is" without any real magical use cases. There is no Crysis for AI. There is no "killer app" or tool apart from ChatGPT or Grok, while the Copilot+ side of the AI PC movement from Microsoft (and AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, and more) is a mess right now.

We'll see things improve in 2025, but right now, AI can feel like another "3D moment" or "VR moment" when we all remember just years ago, when AMD was pushing "VR is not just for the 1%" and how there was a fundamental change of the world coming with VR. VR was the new 3D, and sometimes AI can feel like the new VR or the new 3D.

Post-keynote, now-at-dinner thoughts:

28

Once the event itself was over, it was time to wind down with some dinner and drinks on a warm night in Sydney, so off we went and were greeted with some awesome vibes at The Potting Shed, where we had some good thymes (again, pun intended).

28

This parrot, man... I was sitting with Nick from Gear Seekers when we heard what we thought was a blood-curdling scream, but it was this beautiful parrot sitting behind us at dinner.

28

Yeah... sorry everyone, I had to post pictures of dessert, and yes... it was as nice as it looked.

During dinner and dessert, I was talking to a few people and were making casual conversation about the day. We were pretty honest that AI isn't great right now, it doesn't do our chores yet, it doesn't clean our house, but it is getting closer and closer. It would be a competitive disaster to NOT be trying to be THE best in AI, and AMD is doing a fantastic job against a company FAR bigger (Intel, which has been struggling in more ways than one).

ChatGPT is stellar... Grok is awesome... both powered by NVIDIA AI GPU hardware.

Copilot+ on AI PCs is alright, but it's not like the magical world Microsoft has been marketing for months now, and Recall keeps getting pushed further and further away. Qualcomm has captured a minuscule 0.8% of the AI PC laptop market, showing that people just don't care about AI right now.

This was the sentiment during the night -- we all know AI is here, we all know it's not going to stop, it's only going to continue -- and it WILL get better at almost everything. Personally, I don't use AI for all that much... I'll use Grok to make an image from time to time, I was using ChatGPT + DALL-E to create images for me, and Copilot+ for some testing... but in my everyday workflow? Nope, at least not yet.

AI is coming whether we like it or not.. will it take over your job? Some of them, yes... some jobs will be amplified by AI, and some jobs will be unaffected. I think you'd be naive to not be using AI in some way or another in your workflow, with the likes of doctors, nurses, engineers, writers, content creators, and everyone in between already using ChatGPT, Grok, or some form of generative AI. We can't get away from AI.

I would like to see AI move towards a world where we could watch something like The Matrix, and AI would deepfake something you've entered -- so, "play The Matrix but have Will Smith as Neo, Joe Biden as Agent Smith, Melissa McCarthy as Trinity, and Eminem as Morpheus -- and that's something I'd love to see (and would pay for).