hist78
Well-known member
YouTube suggested this interview to me. I thought it would be just another self-promotional video, but it turned out to be a great and interesting interview that explored the ideas and approaches of the two young co-founders of Etched. Their Low-Voltage Inference (LVI) architecture for high-throughput workloads has helped them secure contracts worth more than $1 billion, using TSMC's N4P process technology.
TSMC is not only Etched's foundry partner but also an early equity investor.
"Gavin Uberti and Robert Wachen, co-founders of Etched, join us to tell the story of building one of the most ambitious AI chip companies in the world.
Three years ago, they were two Harvard dropouts trying to convince skeptics they could build better inference hardware than the largest semiconductor companies on earth. Today, Etched has raised $800M, signed more than $1B in customer contracts, and taped out a working chip designed for the post-ChatGPT era.
We discuss why inference may become the largest market in the world, why Etched built an entire rack instead of just a chip, the technical bets behind low-voltage inference and cluster-scale memory, how they recruited industry legends while still in their twenties, the near-death fundraising moments that almost ended the company, and why the future of AI may belong to whoever can produce the most tokens."
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
1:00 Why Nobody Believed Etched Would Work
14:06 Why Inference Is the Bottleneck
22:27 Gavin and Rob’s Origin Stories
33:24 Taking Huge Risks to Move Faster
49:43 Kernels, Compilers, and the AI Stack
1:02:08 Raising $100M to Survive
1:16:00 The Future of Models, Agents, and Intelligence
TSMC is not only Etched's foundry partner but also an early equity investor.
"Gavin Uberti and Robert Wachen, co-founders of Etched, join us to tell the story of building one of the most ambitious AI chip companies in the world.
Three years ago, they were two Harvard dropouts trying to convince skeptics they could build better inference hardware than the largest semiconductor companies on earth. Today, Etched has raised $800M, signed more than $1B in customer contracts, and taped out a working chip designed for the post-ChatGPT era.
We discuss why inference may become the largest market in the world, why Etched built an entire rack instead of just a chip, the technical bets behind low-voltage inference and cluster-scale memory, how they recruited industry legends while still in their twenties, the near-death fundraising moments that almost ended the company, and why the future of AI may belong to whoever can produce the most tokens."
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
1:00 Why Nobody Believed Etched Would Work
14:06 Why Inference Is the Bottleneck
22:27 Gavin and Rob’s Origin Stories
33:24 Taking Huge Risks to Move Faster
49:43 Kernels, Compilers, and the AI Stack
1:02:08 Raising $100M to Survive
1:16:00 The Future of Models, Agents, and Intelligence