AI needs hardware // AI gadgets & AI accelerators, @sama ventures
“In the months leading up to his dismissal, Altman had been spending more time exploring two new business endeavors. The first was a new consumer hardware device that he would create with Apple’s former chief design officer, Jony Ive. The second was a new startup that created low-cost chips that OpenAI could use to train its AI models. Altman had spent weeks in the Middle East trying to raise money for this second endeavor.
Rather than building a chip, Groq started off by developing software to build a system. With this system, rather than having only a few chips working, several chips are running, with each chip doing its own small part and then handing off the task to the next chip.
“We’re actually 10 times faster, 10 times cheaper, 10 times lower power,” Ross said. “Because we start with a compiler, we can often get software working 20 times faster. If I hadn’t just shown you how fast it was, you wouldn’t believe me. But that’s real, and we’re ramping up our production.”
