I think the question is how many truly great engineers would it take to build some of the necessary APIs. Why spend hundreds of millions in hardware R&D and then underinvest in software that makes the hardware valuable. While the CEO has been doing a stellar job Turing around the company it still feels like they underinvested in software.
I'm not sure if you really understand the peril or how deeply AMD cut back on their R&D Efforts.
Small Cat (Puma cores) were cancelled and that entire department was laid off. This is the core that won AMD the Xbox One and PS4. Small Cat was also their low-power architecture designed for tablets (notice that AMD literally gave up on the growing Tablet market?)
AMD cut DEEP to stay out of bankruptcy. They were cutting known, successful projects and were still losing hundreds of millions of dollars per quarter.
Lets be frank here: if AMD were today, in a position where they had better ROCm or OpenCL or Tensorflow support but say... no "Zen" or "EPYC" ?? They'd be worse off. The CEO made the right bet to focus on Zen as their comeback strategy.
Zen is successful because it demonstratively does something better than Intel. It also doesn't need much software support or tooling, and was designed to be relatively cheap to make. I don't think AMD would have done the same with the NVidia GPGPU compute world, especially since CUDA is a proprietary technology. Even if AMD were to make something better than NVidia, they wouldn't reap any rewards because CUDA is a big moat.
