Every single startup since maybe 1980 that is not borderline criminal has faced at least one incumbent that is better funded and has, frankly, more talent with better experience.

The reason they sometimes win is huge structural or incentive issues in the large companies. And they don't win often.

AMD has failed to fix the problem for years. Is it because the business structure doesn't incentivize it? Is it because the company's entrenched culture is opposed to compensation that might attract the right talent (often out of "fairness")? Is it because there's some internal owner for the function that keeps fucking up but for political reasons the CEO won't replace them and no one else can work on the thing?

Any of these are possible. I have seen - personally witnessed - all of these and more at large companies. We don't know the reason, but we can sort of guess as to the shape of it.

AMD/ATI has always been terrible at drivers/software for their GPUs going back decades.

It’s really as simple as that and it still hasn’t changed so nvidia is dominating them in AI as a result.

AMD has been tackling exactly the wrong problems. They poured their money into a porting solution for developers to take CUDA code and run it on their GPUs. I guess they didn't find it worth it to really compete. I doubt it's about being able to tackle this problem with $5m, but rather convincing the company they can win.

You can say this about every startup that has ever existed.

Vision.

That being said I am still sceptical.

I doubt they have even spent $5M on developing ROCm even though it's been a thing for nearly 10 years. AMD is just notoriously stingy about investing in things outside their core business.