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TBPN · 3 min · Jul 23, 2026

Design customers need on-prem models to protect product IP

Ideogram says enterprise design customers want on-prem deployment to protect unreleased product IP. A compact frontier model can also generate rare manufacturing and defense scenarios for training.

Mohammad Norouzi

Co-founder & CEO, Ideogram

Co-founded Ideogram, a generative AI company for design; previously led Google Brain's Imagen model.

  • John Coogan, Host · Co-host, TBPN

    Co-founded Soylent and Lucy; OpenAI bought his show TBPN in April 2026.

  • Jordi Hays, Host · Co-host, TBPN

    Founded Branded Native; co-founded fintech Capital, which Rho bought.

About this segment

Ideogram says enterprise design customers want on-prem deployment to protect unreleased product IP. A compact frontier model can also generate rare manufacturing and defense scenarios for training.

From “AMD CEO Lisa Su Live on TBPN”, Jul 23, 2026. Watch the full episode

Answers “Is open-source AI catching up?” See all 8 answers

“it's actually a relatively compact model that's at the frontier and it's open vein.”
Mohammad Norouziat 30:46 · TBPN30:46

Takeaways

  1. Future product designs make IP protection a buying requirement.
  2. Compact models can be hosted on premises.
  3. Synthetic images can cover rare manufacturing and defense scenarios.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 39:05Most AI compute is lost to poor scheduling and low utilization3:54
  2. 1:37:06Claude is helping AMD accelerate hardware development3:59
  3. 1:40:58Different workloads need different kinds of compute4:23
  4. 48:48Reinforcement learning scales when experiments give clear feedback3:06
  5. 54:20Spent nuclear fuel retains most of its potential energy3:18
  6. 9:00World models should learn broadly before task-specific tuning3:54

  7. 29:58Design customers need on-prem models to protect product IP2:55

  8. 1:32:43AMD must speed up roadmaps built years in advance2:25Up next

Transcript

From the transcript TBPN publishes with the episode.

  1. 30:03

    But I imagine that your customers are concerned about cost, but also speed, quality, consistency. I know you're partnering with AMD, obviously. But, walk me through a little bit of, like, the problems that you're hearing from enterprises and what you're focused on solving in the short term.

  2. 30:18

    Yeah. One thing is data sovereignty. And, obviously, when it comes to design, IP is extremely important. Mhmm. Lots of competitive industries that, okay, I can't let Yeah. My competitors see the design of my future car. Oh, that's interesting. Sending that over to the cloud. Yeah. And then that that creates a lot of potential issues.

  3. 30:37

    They wanna run your models on prem, or does that mean that they're just wanna know that you're hosting it in a certain certain secure way with a certain SLA around, we're not gonna train on this? I would say both. Both? Okay.

  4. 30:48

    Both. And with the newest model that we released, it's actually a relatively compact model that's at the frontier and it's open vein. Wow. And that creates a new set of opportunities for us in terms of licensing and partnership Yeah. Where companies can host these models on prem. Yeah. That brings down their their cost, but also data sovereignty is really important. So on the design side, that's one one thing we're hearing a lot. Yeah. And then on the brand side, this is still consistency is an issue, but we think we're gonna solve that in the next few months.

  5. 31:18

    Yeah. There's a big there's a big debate over open weight models, geopolitical discussions, and one of the themes that's coming up is, like, American open weight companies might be at a disadvantage if, other countries' open weight models have less respect for intellectual property. And so I would think that you would be fighting with one arm time tied behind your back. But based on your business clients, they might not want a model that infringes on IP because that could wind up getting them in trouble. So is it less of an issue for you?

  6. 31:51

    Or do you see, like, sort of the move fast and break things that may or may not be happening internationally actually being a like a headwind to your business.

  7. 32:01

    On the image side, actually, it seems like American companies are doing really well. Yeah. And we are at the frontier, so so it's not as big of an issue. Yeah. Then the customer side, as long as we give them the protection they need, they are happy. Yeah. But one other set of customers that we are seeing is actually generating data to train really sophisticated models for manufacturing problems Oh. For really unique defense problems Yeah.

  8. 32:29

    Yeah. Where where you don't have a ton of training data. Yeah. And these models are getting to the quality that they can generate images of effects. Yeah. Images of really rare scenarios that Yeah. You can't find in the real world. Yeah. And that's another example where, again, having it on prem is important because they don't wanna Yeah. That out Share that data. With everyone else. Yeah.