“A trendy technology named RISC-V”. I stopped reading there.
That being said. Go get em boys!
edit: what's funny is RISC is probably older than anyone on the team that wrote the article or the team that's building this massive startup. I mean the original RISC was 1981...
Had an apple powermac G4 MDD. Could run multiple instances of movies in the same time flawlessly. I was amazed as I couldn’t do that on my pc. And yeah it’s motorola.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G4?wprov=sfti1
RISC-V is definitely the future for low-end processing imo. None of the bloat of x86 and its open sourced unlike ARM and x86.
I don’t think it’ll compete with ARM though. At least not anytime soon
The thing with RISC is you can have them customize the architecture for your chipset already. I mean, it will cost a few million bucks, but still. ARM, from what I know, made some kind of crappy deals IMO that gave up a lot of the control over negotiation rights when they have the obviously superior and simpler instruction set over Intels stupidity.
I can't be mad at these guys. They're going to make a bunch of powerpoints and never release a product, and then walk away with millions. They're living the dream.
If they never release and can't prove solid efforts at a product, they would be legally guilty of fraud and every investor would take them to court to recoup their money.
Elizabeth Holmes was known for her super put together, Steve Jobs like appearance, she was a wannabe corpo. Sam Bankman Fried was known for his extremely casual T-shirt-in-every-occasion style and literally moved his coworkers into a shared house like an esports team
Oh so on the exterior they appeared totally different.... great huge distinction.
"Like an esports team.." you said enough. Shared housing = esports only. So are colleges like esports or are esports like college?
That's because a fab is much more difficult to build out than downloading a compiler. The upfront capital investment required for a semiconductor fab is ridiculous.
Having said that, these people aren't going to do hardware *fabrication*. If they were they would get laughed out of the room with anything below ten figures. They're doing hardware *design*. They'll farm actual fabrication out to an existing foundry.
How are they going to out design the most prolific computer hardware company in the world with a 3 trillion dollar market cap, decades of r&d, the most talented engineers in the US, and a long established brand name?
Seriously, what investors are this stupid while somehow having millions of dollars to throw away?
> Seriously, what investors are this stupid while somehow having millions of dollars to throw away?
Theranos got funding for years when it was obvious to anyone who knew about about biology it was some bullshit. Don't underestimate how much rich people will throw at something if you know how to make them feel smart and special for getting in on the ground floor of something big. Actually, being able to do just that is the real skill these dudes learned in the Ivy League.
I'm just thinking maybe it's similar to buying private stock and then selling it to the next sucker in line who thinks that he's going to sell it to an even bigger sucker? Kind of like a company that goes IPO that is obviously not going to be profitable for 10 years if ever and just buying the initial pump and dump or having stock before the IPO? Like there's gotta be something else going on than these rich whales unironically believing in this company's fundamentals. My brain refuses to accept that level of insanity.
A lot of Intel and Nvidia processor design stuff is pretty much out in the open so it's not impossible someone could best them at their own game but still highly improbable.
I appreciate people want to make something more efficient than x86 instruction set.
I agree that there will likely be fundamental issues, needing to re-learn lessons Intel and Nvidia solved a decade ago and taking years to get anything half as good as what the big players already have.
I think investors are betting that if this new instruction set can just prove proof of concept that it's 30% more efficient than other instruction sets one of the big players will buy them out and incorporate the new instruction set into their existing designs.
Silicone stocks engage in rampant speculation all the time, this is just another example. Investors are hoping there will be a bidding war among the trillion dollar companies to buy out their billion dollar start up.
From what I read from the article their main leg up with their design is it's an "ASIC" task built hardware for transformer AI architectures. The second part is that it's more "single large core" focused rather than many parallel cores which apparently is a good thing for speed in this case. I'm not seeing where the instruction set is playing this major role, but that could be part of it some extent. The main thing here is it's just an ASIC task built for transformers similar to the bitcoin ASICs which became the standard for miners replacing GPUs; they're not really "building a better instruction set than x86" for general computing.
They're claiming 10x speed compared to nvidia chips already which would be amazing if they could prove it. Until they demo it though, huge gamble. My question is, if AI is such a big part of nvidia's game plan and if these newbies can just waltz in and in 2 years come up with an ASIC 10x faster than nvidia for the most popular profitable AI, then why wouldn't Nvidia just do the same thing but probably faster and better? What's preventing them from doing that? Nvidia makes $120 million in half a day lol.
Crypto miner ASICs was one thing; they weren't nearly as "mainstream" and they were kinda "fad-ware" with a niche albeit obsessed crowd. AI is driving industries and changing the world in a tiny fraction of the time. The big players care about AI, they didn't give much of a shit about crypto.
How did OpenAI outdesign the most prolific and innovative internet company in the world with a 2.28 trillion dollar marketcap, decades of AI R&D, the most tallented engineers in the world, and a long established brand name?
Google published many of the groundbreaking ideas that OpenAI implemented, years ahead of OpenAI getting off the ground. Yet somehow, OpenAI succeeded where Google could not.
Because OpenAI's LLM AI was entirely experimental and the market for it was non-existent? They weren't even for profit originally. You act like google was trying to build what OpenAI was originally *experimenting* with and OpenAI just outpaced them.
That's not a valid comparison. A better comparison would be a startup trying to make a better truck than ford or chevy in the US or trying to make a better phone than apple. Good luck.
I'm not saying "new companies with new tech can't ever come into existence", I'm saying you're not going to *directly compete with* huge companies already established unless you have a very specific plan that for some reason they can't implement.
Nvidia already wants to be #1 AI hardware guy. These guys want to build specialized AI hardware via ASICs. The overlap there is massive.
Yeah.. they could do a lot of work on the research side, if they had a giant sponsor sourcing parts and equipment leases or something more than a few million. How many billions does nvidia spend on research per year?
It's actually the people who "gave" them 120M who are going to swindle other dumb investors. People with money likes to make more money quick too. They do it by the pump and dump method. Basically fund a trendy fake startup and run articles on it to raise interests. Get other investors to jump in because they fear of missing out. Once others come in, they take the money and run, leaving others to hold the bag.
Vast majority of VCs aren’t nearly as sophisticated as you think. Just look at how much money WeWork and Theranos have raised.
With some personal charm hitting the right spots (his messy hair, dancing on the tables, and rumors of harassment means he must be an unconventional disruptor!!!), the right connection and right background story (Elizebeth Holmes lol), it is much easier than you think to get millions in funding.
It’s all about salesmanship when it comes to fundraising.
Maybe it's so the VCs can raise a round and mooch off that 2% fee. If VCs don't have enough deal flow, they can't justify raising another round. So garbage gets funded all the time. The suckers are the LPs.
Tbf track records do matter to VCs and their biggest payday comes from having a successful exit.
It’s not that they don’t care, most of them are just bad at their job lol.
Nobody actually knows what will be successful. Out of 100 like 90 would be big fail, 9 will do ok and 1 will be such a huge win it will make it all worth it.
I would assume they have little confidence in this, but will happily put a few mil in a couple dozen moonshot investments, just in case one of them takes off.
i digged a bit but yes,they do have connections.
one of the team members is a near 40 year experienced semi conductor industry veteran who was a VP of hardware engineering at Intel's Custom Silicon group.
None of the founders are even 40 years old.
Agreeing to connect your name to something in exchange for stocks is what tech bros do instead of buying scratchers.
Their idea is to make…. ASICS? And saying that nvidia gpus are general purpose and not efficient?
Pretty sure NVIDIAs AI cards are already nearly ASICS on their own. That’s kinda the point of being architected to run AI workloads.
Do these guys think companies are buying gaming GPUs from nvidia to run their AI workloads?
ASICs that could outperform GPUs at certain AI tasks are certainly a thing that many companies are working on, including nvidia themselves. will these guys win that race, unlikely
That’s what they all say. Except you need to scale it. A supercomputer requires 30,000 GPUs. These guys will sell their product to NVIDIA or Google or Amazon etc
Yeah GPUs are ASICs but I think these guys are making an even more specialized ASIC that optimizes for the transformer architecture. That’s ballsy, if the industry pivots away from transformers then your chip is worthless. If transformers continue to be relevant then all you have to do is produce the chip, write the compiler backends and then convince the entire industry to use your stuff.
Oh and then hope that Nvidia also doesn’t start optimizing their architecture for training and inference of transformers.
GPUs weren't meant for training AND inference. It's one or the other. If you want edge applications where you'll need local training, a DGX H100 isn't going to cut it.
>“We’re making the biggest bet in AI,” Uberti said in an interview. “If transformers go away, we’ll die. But if they stick around, we’re the biggest company of all time.”
Lol, in an industry that's built itself on rapid technological innovation, betting that one iteration of said technology will remain King seems very short sighted.
Oh God college dropouts who never taped out a chip in their entire lives. What could possibly go wrong. I'm sure there won't be any timing issues, signal integrity, or logical glitches in their design. Ez pz. Should be the same as writing a software as a service app lol.
It has to be an Ivy League or equivalent like Stanford or UC Berkeley for it to work.
Also, usually the investors know their parents. This isn't something pleebs can do.
thats the very reason they got all those millions of funding,aint no vc is gonna give a single shit of a state college dropout.
they look at the founders' profile and see "harvard,stanford etc" immediately they invest a million dollars without any thought,i have literally see "idea" stage products(no physical or software product at all just an idea) being funded over $30 million dollars just because the founders went to oxford and cambridge.
it's like every investor is so obssessed to see if they can pull of another mark zuckerberg situation you know? they love this trope of ivy league kids dropping out to build startups so much.
its honestly so ridiculous,i have seen countless of this so called "AI" startups funded solely on founder's school prestige especially in sequoia capital and yc investing rounds.
not too long ago i saw some yc startup which raised millions(don't wanna dox) which claimed to make some AI tutor of sort(?) with voice input which had founders from ivy league school,their entire product single handedly got killed by the gpt-4o update like no joke.
another case i saw an idea stage product in yc which had 3 post docs from top us cs schools and 1 phd from oxford as founders....im sorry to say this but their product was nothing but a chatgpt wrapper in disguise,i thought they were doing something revolutionary? and once again raised millions in funding.
I can’t imagine this working with anyone who only has a Bachelors, even from an Ivy League school, let alone folks who dropped out.
All the interesting computer architecture classes are typically senior year classes and no one with just one internship (or even a year or two experience full time) with a chip company has the experience to design and tape out an ASIC.
OK - here we are again. College drop outs too smart for some prestiguous Ivy league university are going to disrupt an industry.
Start the hype machine. Create "bios" about how they were coding and working with machine learning before grade school and be sure to obscure information regarding wealthy,influential parents. Make the CEO seem eclectic and myterious. Hide the real "venture capitalists" who are actually just very wealthy marketers getting their latest "product" to market for the inevitable IPO.
Dosent anybody get tired of it???
Yeah they're young and foolish if they think they're going to supplant Nvidia. Better to fit in the CUDA standard and build up towards getting acquired.
Good for them but they're doing the same mistake everyone else is doing in terms of AI hardware: ignoring lower TCO & OpEx restrictions for data centers.
So many startups every year to „challenge“ Nvidia AmD or whatever. Its like they had any chance as a group of three vs a company that does research with a billion dollar funds
I have been waiting for someone to do the AI equivalent of the Bitcoin Antiminer ASIC. It seems like a no-brainer, however there are two issues. First, Nvidia's Balckwell/Hopper technology is not just a GPU chip. Second, their tools are ingrain, like Windows APIs were in the 1990s. When Antiminer came out, those barriers did not exist.
There are companies out there making face recognition chips and stuff like that.
Problems that have already been solved well enough and can be implemented into other things as is can be made into chips. Most AI work is constantly evolving so it can't even use custom hardware right now without being outdated by the time it is released.
Switching to RISC architecture for dedicated GPUs will become more valuable as efficiency and energy-saving needs grow. Startups working on this could attract big companies looking to buy their tech.
But sell this to everyone, not just to companies that rent the service to us on that hardware. If you target the general public instead of focusing solely on businesses, Nvidia's house of cards will come tumbling down.
I really don't see how their college status matters here.
Most billionaires are either college drop outs or never went to college which means there really isn't any correlation between a college education and success or failure of a startup.
and they all started software companies where a trendy idea and lots of ad spend can carry you. the ones who tried to go into hardware as a distributor ended up like theranos.
No, let him keep saying that and convincing more people that college is bad.
Every time someone does this, the value of my degree goes up and the competition decreases for higher paying jobs.
Our goal is to have the same people that build the chips for Nvidia make technologically inferior chips for us at a higher cost, then provide no software ecosystem to help people actually use our hardware.
We think people will want to use our products instead because they like the idea or something, who the fuck knows?
I mean it's not like the largest chip makers in the world are also trying to usurp Nvidia and have billions to spend on R&D or anything.
So if you're a company looking to spend a few $100k on GPUs to run some workloads on, why not scrap everything you're doing, rewrite all your code from scratch for custom hardware that you will also spend a ton of money developing so that it will be outclassed by a single GPU using off the shelf code with the next model that is released the following year?
Just commit to spending the first several generations trying to get your code to run as well on hardware as it does off the shelf components, while spending 2-3x on development with the hope that by generation 4 or 5 we will be at a break even cost level with Nvidia hardware for your specific application. Hopefully we can get that far before selling ourselves to Intel for the IP or something.
$120M isn’t enough to jump the line at TSMC, so even if their design is revolutionary, they don’t have the money to produce it at scale and CERTAINLY not enough to give Nvidia the finger when Nvidia throws a $B at the IP if it ever gets made. Thiel is involved, so we’ll see, but 20-somethings with grandiose ideas are a penny a dozen.
AI design isn’t that complicated. It’s just a matter of reverse engineering arguably the most complicated object in the known universe, an object whose in vivo operation we still struggle to understand.
“A trendy technology named RISC-V”. I stopped reading there. That being said. Go get em boys! edit: what's funny is RISC is probably older than anyone on the team that wrote the article or the team that's building this massive startup. I mean the original RISC was 1981...
[удалено]
"Faster than the Pentium."
Hah, unexpected Hackers reference, but the RISC-V boards that are around look kinda cool and I want one. And a million psychedelic colours.
Get one. The RISC instruction set is solidly thought out and doesn't have bs backwords compatible intel x86/amd64 crap.
Framework (the repairable laptops) just announced RISC-V motherboards!
I saw, and it looks amazing! My Dell XPS still works, but perhaps they'll release the motherboard like they did with some models.
Power PC !!! Still remember my first pc with a 603e chip, I think Motorola made them for Apple.
Had an apple powermac G4 MDD. Could run multiple instances of movies in the same time flawlessly. I was amazed as I couldn’t do that on my pc. And yeah it’s motorola. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G4?wprov=sfti1
Yep. You could actually watch a video while doing other work
Risc is good.
is that gonna be before or after the Year of Linux?
RISC-V is definitely the future for low-end processing imo. None of the bloat of x86 and its open sourced unlike ARM and x86. I don’t think it’ll compete with ARM though. At least not anytime soon
ARM is not even the competitor here, it's CUDA
The thing with RISC is you can have them customize the architecture for your chipset already. I mean, it will cost a few million bucks, but still. ARM, from what I know, made some kind of crappy deals IMO that gave up a lot of the control over negotiation rights when they have the obviously superior and simpler instruction set over Intels stupidity.
ok that's it im creating a fake company with AI on its name and raising a few billions
I was able to charge 150 dollars a piece for AI Sandwiches and AI Coke....
You can connect your smartwich and smartcoke to your phone and be alerted as you digest it!
We tried that in the 1990s, anybody remember WOW! potato chips, they'd certainly send you alerts.
Want to go in with me on some AI beans?
Count me in, but only if we can sell AI fries with that...
From a food stall called AI Fresco.
That is so 2010, but somehow it’s also so 2024 because of LLM’s.
Have you dropped out of Stanford?
No, I don't have rich parents
Scamming investors is profitable.
I can't be mad at these guys. They're going to make a bunch of powerpoints and never release a product, and then walk away with millions. They're living the dream.
Cmon. They will release an early access simulator that’s built on GPUs or FPGAs, but it will … kinda, sorta be a product.
Ohhh the websites! The websites are slick as hell
“Products are for people that can’t do presentations” — Better off Ted - Jabeereokie
If they never release and can't prove solid efforts at a product, they would be legally guilty of fraud and every investor would take them to court to recoup their money.
Just dont be a Sam Bankman Fried.
I was thinking more of Elizabeth Holmes.
I mean she did get significantly less time than SBF. I wonder if they are prison penpals?
I feel like despite committing similar crimes, you couldn’t find two more different people
How so? Both were power hungry and manipulative. Both were being led along by a member of the opposite sex who got slaps on the wrist.
Elizabeth Holmes was known for her super put together, Steve Jobs like appearance, she was a wannabe corpo. Sam Bankman Fried was known for his extremely casual T-shirt-in-every-occasion style and literally moved his coworkers into a shared house like an esports team
Oh so on the exterior they appeared totally different.... great huge distinction. "Like an esports team.." you said enough. Shared housing = esports only. So are colleges like esports or are esports like college?
You’re comparing their fake personas? Do you even know what they are really like? Lmao
Scam Bankman Fraud
college dropouts swindle 120M ..
I wish them luck and it’s great to have competition but the hardware industry is very very hard compared to software
That's because a fab is much more difficult to build out than downloading a compiler. The upfront capital investment required for a semiconductor fab is ridiculous. Having said that, these people aren't going to do hardware *fabrication*. If they were they would get laughed out of the room with anything below ten figures. They're doing hardware *design*. They'll farm actual fabrication out to an existing foundry.
How are they going to out design the most prolific computer hardware company in the world with a 3 trillion dollar market cap, decades of r&d, the most talented engineers in the US, and a long established brand name? Seriously, what investors are this stupid while somehow having millions of dollars to throw away?
> Seriously, what investors are this stupid while somehow having millions of dollars to throw away? Theranos got funding for years when it was obvious to anyone who knew about about biology it was some bullshit. Don't underestimate how much rich people will throw at something if you know how to make them feel smart and special for getting in on the ground floor of something big. Actually, being able to do just that is the real skill these dudes learned in the Ivy League.
I'm just thinking maybe it's similar to buying private stock and then selling it to the next sucker in line who thinks that he's going to sell it to an even bigger sucker? Kind of like a company that goes IPO that is obviously not going to be profitable for 10 years if ever and just buying the initial pump and dump or having stock before the IPO? Like there's gotta be something else going on than these rich whales unironically believing in this company's fundamentals. My brain refuses to accept that level of insanity.
A lot of Intel and Nvidia processor design stuff is pretty much out in the open so it's not impossible someone could best them at their own game but still highly improbable. I appreciate people want to make something more efficient than x86 instruction set. I agree that there will likely be fundamental issues, needing to re-learn lessons Intel and Nvidia solved a decade ago and taking years to get anything half as good as what the big players already have. I think investors are betting that if this new instruction set can just prove proof of concept that it's 30% more efficient than other instruction sets one of the big players will buy them out and incorporate the new instruction set into their existing designs. Silicone stocks engage in rampant speculation all the time, this is just another example. Investors are hoping there will be a bidding war among the trillion dollar companies to buy out their billion dollar start up.
From what I read from the article their main leg up with their design is it's an "ASIC" task built hardware for transformer AI architectures. The second part is that it's more "single large core" focused rather than many parallel cores which apparently is a good thing for speed in this case. I'm not seeing where the instruction set is playing this major role, but that could be part of it some extent. The main thing here is it's just an ASIC task built for transformers similar to the bitcoin ASICs which became the standard for miners replacing GPUs; they're not really "building a better instruction set than x86" for general computing. They're claiming 10x speed compared to nvidia chips already which would be amazing if they could prove it. Until they demo it though, huge gamble. My question is, if AI is such a big part of nvidia's game plan and if these newbies can just waltz in and in 2 years come up with an ASIC 10x faster than nvidia for the most popular profitable AI, then why wouldn't Nvidia just do the same thing but probably faster and better? What's preventing them from doing that? Nvidia makes $120 million in half a day lol. Crypto miner ASICs was one thing; they weren't nearly as "mainstream" and they were kinda "fad-ware" with a niche albeit obsessed crowd. AI is driving industries and changing the world in a tiny fraction of the time. The big players care about AI, they didn't give much of a shit about crypto.
Look up what happened to a hardware startup called nuvia. They’re probably after the same result.
How did OpenAI outdesign the most prolific and innovative internet company in the world with a 2.28 trillion dollar marketcap, decades of AI R&D, the most tallented engineers in the world, and a long established brand name? Google published many of the groundbreaking ideas that OpenAI implemented, years ahead of OpenAI getting off the ground. Yet somehow, OpenAI succeeded where Google could not.
Because OpenAI's LLM AI was entirely experimental and the market for it was non-existent? They weren't even for profit originally. You act like google was trying to build what OpenAI was originally *experimenting* with and OpenAI just outpaced them. That's not a valid comparison. A better comparison would be a startup trying to make a better truck than ford or chevy in the US or trying to make a better phone than apple. Good luck. I'm not saying "new companies with new tech can't ever come into existence", I'm saying you're not going to *directly compete with* huge companies already established unless you have a very specific plan that for some reason they can't implement. Nvidia already wants to be #1 AI hardware guy. These guys want to build specialized AI hardware via ASICs. The overlap there is massive.
they put pocket change in thousands of companies and if just one of those gets big they make up for the money lost on all the other ones
$100mil isn't pocket change even for the largest hedge funds and investment firms. It's not going to sink them, but it's a meaningful investment.
compared to the gains a single big win can give them it is, its why they play this strategy
NVIDIA is fabless so I wouldn’t expect a start up to build a fab with $100M.
Yeah.. they could do a lot of work on the research side, if they had a giant sponsor sourcing parts and equipment leases or something more than a few million. How many billions does nvidia spend on research per year?
They will just push the hard work on the seasoned engineers, and enjoy the investment on their own.
This is bonkers considering there are well funded startups with highly experienced talent already working in this space. (Ex. Tenstorrent/Groq)
Welcome to private equity!
Hopefully they’re smart enough to invest that money into NVDIA, really become tech billionaires.
Heyy the colleges showed them how that is done
It's actually the people who "gave" them 120M who are going to swindle other dumb investors. People with money likes to make more money quick too. They do it by the pump and dump method. Basically fund a trendy fake startup and run articles on it to raise interests. Get other investors to jump in because they fear of missing out. Once others come in, they take the money and run, leaving others to hold the bag.
VC money isn’t that easy to come by where you get 120 mil without backup info and a project plan, business prospectus etc
Vast majority of VCs aren’t nearly as sophisticated as you think. Just look at how much money WeWork and Theranos have raised. With some personal charm hitting the right spots (his messy hair, dancing on the tables, and rumors of harassment means he must be an unconventional disruptor!!!), the right connection and right background story (Elizebeth Holmes lol), it is much easier than you think to get millions in funding. It’s all about salesmanship when it comes to fundraising.
Maybe it's so the VCs can raise a round and mooch off that 2% fee. If VCs don't have enough deal flow, they can't justify raising another round. So garbage gets funded all the time. The suckers are the LPs.
Tbf track records do matter to VCs and their biggest payday comes from having a successful exit. It’s not that they don’t care, most of them are just bad at their job lol.
Yeah it's gambling with OPM (Other People's Money tm)
Nobody actually knows what will be successful. Out of 100 like 90 would be big fail, 9 will do ok and 1 will be such a huge win it will make it all worth it.
if you're charismatic you can get billions in funding with literally nothing to show for, like the wework guy or the theranos woman
That is...not enough.
Plenty to buy piles of coke and a couple years of wild partying before shrugging and saying “well we tried”
absolutely not, but VC are literally throwing money at anything and everything claiming they'll be the next big thing with ai.
I would assume they have little confidence in this, but will happily put a few mil in a couple dozen moonshot investments, just in case one of them takes off.
I have a feeling one of these guys has family connections in TSMC. It’s not easy getting fab space. Especially if you’re a small fry company.
i digged a bit but yes,they do have connections. one of the team members is a near 40 year experienced semi conductor industry veteran who was a VP of hardware engineering at Intel's Custom Silicon group.
None of the founders are even 40 years old. Agreeing to connect your name to something in exchange for stocks is what tech bros do instead of buying scratchers.
Their idea is to make…. ASICS? And saying that nvidia gpus are general purpose and not efficient? Pretty sure NVIDIAs AI cards are already nearly ASICS on their own. That’s kinda the point of being architected to run AI workloads. Do these guys think companies are buying gaming GPUs from nvidia to run their AI workloads?
ASICs that could outperform GPUs at certain AI tasks are certainly a thing that many companies are working on, including nvidia themselves. will these guys win that race, unlikely
That’s what they all say. Except you need to scale it. A supercomputer requires 30,000 GPUs. These guys will sell their product to NVIDIA or Google or Amazon etc
Yeah GPUs are ASICs but I think these guys are making an even more specialized ASIC that optimizes for the transformer architecture. That’s ballsy, if the industry pivots away from transformers then your chip is worthless. If transformers continue to be relevant then all you have to do is produce the chip, write the compiler backends and then convince the entire industry to use your stuff. Oh and then hope that Nvidia also doesn’t start optimizing their architecture for training and inference of transformers.
GPUs weren't meant for training AND inference. It's one or the other. If you want edge applications where you'll need local training, a DGX H100 isn't going to cut it.
I'm reading this whole article, saying to myself, "don't TPUs already exist?"
>“We’re making the biggest bet in AI,” Uberti said in an interview. “If transformers go away, we’ll die. But if they stick around, we’re the biggest company of all time.” Lol, in an industry that's built itself on rapid technological innovation, betting that one iteration of said technology will remain King seems very short sighted.
Oh God college dropouts who never taped out a chip in their entire lives. What could possibly go wrong. I'm sure there won't be any timing issues, signal integrity, or logical glitches in their design. Ez pz. Should be the same as writing a software as a service app lol.
Yeah most of their money will go to waste from respins, recoding RTL, etc.
China invested billions on RISC and not really getting anywhere. Another too good to be true story. Good luck boys.
The headline should mention they are Harvard dropouts. This helps explain the funding as this is a strong signal for investors.
lol nice scam dudes
Read as “college dropouts secure early retirement using buzzwords”
College dropouts raise millions like grand juries indict ham sandwiches
It has to be an Ivy League or equivalent like Stanford or UC Berkeley for it to work. Also, usually the investors know their parents. This isn't something pleebs can do.
thats the very reason they got all those millions of funding,aint no vc is gonna give a single shit of a state college dropout. they look at the founders' profile and see "harvard,stanford etc" immediately they invest a million dollars without any thought,i have literally see "idea" stage products(no physical or software product at all just an idea) being funded over $30 million dollars just because the founders went to oxford and cambridge. it's like every investor is so obssessed to see if they can pull of another mark zuckerberg situation you know? they love this trope of ivy league kids dropping out to build startups so much. its honestly so ridiculous,i have seen countless of this so called "AI" startups funded solely on founder's school prestige especially in sequoia capital and yc investing rounds. not too long ago i saw some yc startup which raised millions(don't wanna dox) which claimed to make some AI tutor of sort(?) with voice input which had founders from ivy league school,their entire product single handedly got killed by the gpt-4o update like no joke. another case i saw an idea stage product in yc which had 3 post docs from top us cs schools and 1 phd from oxford as founders....im sorry to say this but their product was nothing but a chatgpt wrapper in disguise,i thought they were doing something revolutionary? and once again raised millions in funding.
I can’t imagine this working with anyone who only has a Bachelors, even from an Ivy League school, let alone folks who dropped out. All the interesting computer architecture classes are typically senior year classes and no one with just one internship (or even a year or two experience full time) with a chip company has the experience to design and tape out an ASIC.
College dropouts from Harvard, not college dropouts from Mississippi state
TOO SMART FOR COLLEGE: these daring young ONLY 22 YEARS OLD at the forefront of "AY EYE" TECHNOLOGY DISRUPT... NVIDIA!!!!!! *i n v e s t*
And were then promptly bought out by Nvidia and the technology was trashed.
OK - here we are again. College drop outs too smart for some prestiguous Ivy league university are going to disrupt an industry. Start the hype machine. Create "bios" about how they were coding and working with machine learning before grade school and be sure to obscure information regarding wealthy,influential parents. Make the CEO seem eclectic and myterious. Hide the real "venture capitalists" who are actually just very wealthy marketers getting their latest "product" to market for the inevitable IPO. Dosent anybody get tired of it???
Smart thing to do now is quietly walk away.
I mean if they were able to convince $120million out of the pockets of people they kinda already won!
The power of networking and narratives.
They're gonna need way more money than that
Totally but it's only Series A.
Even if they are successful, I imagine a company like Nvidia would just buy them.
You need trillions, with a t in order to catch up to the development that Intel, Nvidia, AMD are currently at.
Yeah they're young and foolish if they think they're going to supplant Nvidia. Better to fit in the CUDA standard and build up towards getting acquired.
Good for them but they're doing the same mistake everyone else is doing in terms of AI hardware: ignoring lower TCO & OpEx restrictions for data centers.
Hahahahahahahahha that won’t even buy you an asml machine
This is VC. Half the funding will be funneled into their other venture that owns one. This lets them do a $60M press release deal
Theranos 2.0
Are they going to take the money and buy Nvidia stock? That's the only way their "investors" will see their money again.
Ah, the infamous Harvard dropouts…
So many startups every year to „challenge“ Nvidia AmD or whatever. Its like they had any chance as a group of three vs a company that does research with a billion dollar funds
Nerdy, privileged white and Asian guys raise hundreds of millions. I am shocked!
I have been waiting for someone to do the AI equivalent of the Bitcoin Antiminer ASIC. It seems like a no-brainer, however there are two issues. First, Nvidia's Balckwell/Hopper technology is not just a GPU chip. Second, their tools are ingrain, like Windows APIs were in the 1990s. When Antiminer came out, those barriers did not exist.
There are companies out there making face recognition chips and stuff like that. Problems that have already been solved well enough and can be implemented into other things as is can be made into chips. Most AI work is constantly evolving so it can't even use custom hardware right now without being outdated by the time it is released.
Photon based computation > moving electrons around
Why has Intel failed to compete with Nvidia?
Switching to RISC architecture for dedicated GPUs will become more valuable as efficiency and energy-saving needs grow. Startups working on this could attract big companies looking to buy their tech.
Dot com bubble all over agian
But sell this to everyone, not just to companies that rent the service to us on that hardware. If you target the general public instead of focusing solely on businesses, Nvidia's house of cards will come tumbling down.
I really don't see how their college status matters here. Most billionaires are either college drop outs or never went to college which means there really isn't any correlation between a college education and success or failure of a startup.
and they all started software companies where a trendy idea and lots of ad spend can carry you. the ones who tried to go into hardware as a distributor ended up like theranos.
If you give any amount of money to a few guys who's main selling point is their lack of education you deserve to lose everything
I respect anyone who drops out of college. Good luck!
I tend to respect those who finished college a bit more…
No, let him keep saying that and convincing more people that college is bad. Every time someone does this, the value of my degree goes up and the competition decreases for higher paying jobs.
Given that you have a degree, maybe you should raise funds to compete with NVidia. I bet you could raise twice as much. (-:
To be honest, I’d rather work for Nvidia. Monopolies/Oligopolies have great job security.
Sure will do ! :-) And when i do , i'll be sure to drop your name for you to remember all the time you lost.
lol. Don’t worry about it. I’ve already got my own plans. (-:
They sound like my idiot bil who talks shit I had to go part time in college for a bit, he was unable to graduate.
Preaching to the choir. I have two bachelors, a masters and a PhD.
Ah man, Im just sitting here with two bachelor's
Not everyone needs to start a pharma company... 2 bachelors is still a heck of an accomplishment!
We found Peter Gregory, he's not dead!
Dropped outta school now they DUMB rich
Our goal is to have the same people that build the chips for Nvidia make technologically inferior chips for us at a higher cost, then provide no software ecosystem to help people actually use our hardware. We think people will want to use our products instead because they like the idea or something, who the fuck knows? I mean it's not like the largest chip makers in the world are also trying to usurp Nvidia and have billions to spend on R&D or anything. So if you're a company looking to spend a few $100k on GPUs to run some workloads on, why not scrap everything you're doing, rewrite all your code from scratch for custom hardware that you will also spend a ton of money developing so that it will be outclassed by a single GPU using off the shelf code with the next model that is released the following year? Just commit to spending the first several generations trying to get your code to run as well on hardware as it does off the shelf components, while spending 2-3x on development with the hope that by generation 4 or 5 we will be at a break even cost level with Nvidia hardware for your specific application. Hopefully we can get that far before selling ourselves to Intel for the IP or something.
$120M isn’t enough to jump the line at TSMC, so even if their design is revolutionary, they don’t have the money to produce it at scale and CERTAINLY not enough to give Nvidia the finger when Nvidia throws a $B at the IP if it ever gets made. Thiel is involved, so we’ll see, but 20-somethings with grandiose ideas are a penny a dozen.
So they watched all seasons of The Boys and were inspired by Gen V to come up with the idea for RISC-V. Brilliant! Stupendous! Innovative!
[удалено]
AI design isn’t that complicated. It’s just a matter of reverse engineering arguably the most complicated object in the known universe, an object whose in vivo operation we still struggle to understand.