Sharon Zhou

Sharon Zhou is vice president of AI at AMD and co-founded Lamini, a platform for fine-tuning large language models. She started Lamini in 2022 with Greg Diamos, a former Nvidia CUDA software architect, and joined AMD with several Lamini employees in June 2025. PitchBook lists Lamini as out of business as of November 2025.

Finding Technology Through User Experience

Zhou has described an unconventional childhood full of spontaneity and the outdoors, with "not a lot of technology," she told TheSequence. She studied ancient history, then found technology through user experience and its rule that it is never the user's fault. She worked as a product manager at machine-learning startups and then at Google. CRN identified those startups as Kensho Technologies and Tamr.

Failing to Drop Out of a Stanford PhD

Zhou earned a PhD in computer science at Stanford University, advised by Andrew Ng. "I told my PhD advisor, Andrew Ng, that day one, that my plan was to drop out," she said on The MAD Podcast, but she "fell in love with generative models." She stayed on as computer science faculty at Stanford and created a Coursera course on generative AI that she said reached more than 80,000 students.

Moving the Lamini Team to AMD

Lamini let enterprises fine-tune models, and AMD highlighted it in 2023 as an early software supporter of its Instinct GPUs. An AMD spokesperson told CRN that the 2025 move was a hiring, not an acquisition. Lamini has since shut down; PitchBook lists it as out of business. As vice president of AI, Zhou said she would pursue AI research and teaching.