DeepThoughts on The Boom in AI Chips

If this is your first time here, take a second to click?subscribe! Feel free to send questions, comments, and suggestions for improvement to?[email protected].

The Boom in AI Chips ??

A recent article by Amazon details how after acquiring Annapurna Labs, an Israeli-based chipmaker, in 2015, AWS developed an entire chip ecosystem for a wide variety of computing tasks: Five generations of the AWS Nitro System and three generations of the Arm-based Graviton processor – powering Amazon’s EC2 instances for data-intensive workloads. And the AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia chips – optimized for machine learning training and inference.

After decades of innovation for general-purpose chips, new market opportunities have opened up lately for specialized chips geared towards training or inference for neural networks. There’s an insatiable need for machine learning, so if you have a good product, the demand is definitely there. The challenges are a) that customers want to migrate without any friction to different hardware and b) that machine learning is moving very fast: As a chip’s lifecycle takes about five years, you need to anticipate trends years ahead.?

Companies relying heavily on machine learning not only build a data moat over time but can also evaluate data more efficiently using specialized chips. This is ultimately leading to better machine learning models – as for Alexa: The more people use it, the more value it delivers and with its Inferentia chips, Amazon can train and operate Alexa at lower costs and less latency than with general-purpose chips.?

At Lunar, we’re following this trend closely and are curious to see new business models and algorithms evolving on top of this new wave of silicon innovation. As Nafea Bshara, one of the co-founders of Annapurna Labs, said in the article: “If you can dream it, you can do it. … we continue to dream big on behalf of our customers.”

Reminder to founders ??

If you're a technologist, cryptographer, hacker, or founder building something big, we’d love to speak to you! Reach out at [email protected]

Interesting Reads ??

Political Chips – Yes, the United States supports Taiwan because of democracy, freedom, human rights, AND because of chips and TSMC. A good read by Ben Thompson.?

The Coming AI Chip Boom – If you like to know what is next after GPUs, this is a really good YouTube video on the subject.?

A 6 minute introduction to end to end encryption – If you have always wanted to know how your data is protected today, this article by Zama is for you.?

The Wild Bug Hunt – Strategies for bug hunting by Codavel.?

Why thinking hard makes us feel tired – Researchers have found that cognitive fatigue is linked to rising levels of glutamate, an important signaling molecule, in the brain.

Fun Stuff? ??