Etched - Building AI Hardware to Make Inference Faster and Cheaper - [Invest Like the Best, EP.480]
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Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of PositiveSum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of PositiveSum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit pspsum.vc.
My guests today are Gavin Uberti and Rob Lockett, the founders of Etched. A few years ago when they set out to build a better AI chip than the largest companies in the world, almost everyone I called told me it could not be done. They've since done it, taping out a working chip on their first attempt and becoming the first hardware company founded after ChatGPT to do so. There you have more than a billion dollars of customer demand for their first product and have raised $800,000,000 to build it. Etch to build chips and systems designed to run AI models faster and at lower cost. They started t
I think there's a certain level of naivety required to think that you could build a chip better than every other AI chip ever built and build a company to do it way faster than ever has been done. And we have the naivety. But there's many times where we would say, like, why isn't this possible? And, you know, really push on it. And it turns out that, like, everybody's answers are extremely siloed to a set of constraints that aren't true anymore. And the reality is the entire semiconductors and data center industry is built on buffer. And what I mean by that is every part of the stack from the
There are some folks who went purely on heuristics. Of, hey, young founders, they claim they can go beat the biggest company in world of performance, it cannot happen. And there is no thing you could go say to me that would make me change my mind. But there's also people out there who are of course skeptical, but are willing to go ahead and say, I'll spend the time, I'll do the work, and is it actually possible? Like for example, one of our earliest, earliest supporters was Mark Ross, and Mark was a very prestigious semiconductor expert. He used to be CTO at Cypress Semi that sold for $9,000,0
The specifics that you've made bets on, the way that you built this system are immensely interesting to me. And because so many people are trying to do this now, build new chips that will do a better job of serving inference at massive scale, The world is interested in the research approaches, the different architecture approaches that people are taking to building a new AI chip. And I'd love you to just start by describing what this thing is, what it does, but maybe more interestingly and more importantly, the process that you went through to decide what bets to take, what technologies to inv
Yeah, I think that you can start with the product. We're not just building a chip, we're building a full inference solution, and that means a r
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