The First AI Chip Startup with Naveen Rao, Nervana Systems
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 ก.ย. 2024
- Over the past five years, over 50 companies dedicated to making artificial intelligence run faster have sprung up. Whether in data centers or in cars, like Tesla’s automobiles, all of these innova-tions arguably started with NVIDIA and the move to deep learning on graphics processing units (GPUs). This created an entire industry. The first AI chip company was Nervana Systems, and its Founder, Naveen Rao, joins us to shares his insights. In this episode, we hear about Naveen’s academic and professional backgrounds and how he used his engineering and neuroscience skills to start Nervana after working at Qualcomm. We discuss what fundraising for Nervana was like and how the venture capital (VC) landscape changed its attitude to hardware concurrent with Nervana’s growth and innovation. The company was ultimately acquired by Intel, and we learn about how it went from a business development proposition to acquisition. Naveen shares the personnel and resource constraints Nervana faced despite being part of a much larger organi-zation such as Intel, and how his role ultimately changed over time. While Intel has kept some of Nervana’s developments, they have also gone in different directions, and Naveen shares his take on this. The discussion also touches on Nervana and NVIDA’s love/hate relationship, what is piquing Naveen’s interest now that he is no longer at Intel, and where he thinks the outcomes of the work in the space are likely to lead. To hear more, tune in today!
Key Points From This Episode:
· Naveen’s background and moving from engineering to computational neuroscience.
· Hear about Naveen’s time as Qualcomm and the neuromorphic computing research he was doing.
· How a failed internal pitch for an artificial neural network at Qualcomm led to Nervana’s crea-tion.
· Nervana’s founding story, building the team, and fundraising for the company.
· The difficulty of pitching chip investments to VCs, who has lost money in the early 2000s.
· Changes in VC attitudes towards hardware by the time Nervana had raised 20 million dollars.
· Hear more about the nature of Nervana’s relationship with NVIDIA.
· How the deal with Intel went from biz dev to acquisition.
· Some of the obstacles that came with being bought by a big company.
· Getting an offer to head up the AI team at Intel and the challenges this brought for Naveen.
· How the release of Volta, NVIDIA’s chip, changed the competition in the space.
· The game plan changes after Volta’s release and splitting into inference and training paths.
· The importance of patience in the space; NVDIA has always bet on their team.
· Naveen’s position on Intel acquiring Habana and how his job changed after this acquisition.
· Naveen’s impression of the AI companies that have sprouted up since.
· Unpacking the critical software for this type of development.
· Google’s GPU team and the advantage they have on the inference side.
· NVIDA’s acquisitions and Naveen’s take on what they are trying to do.
· What Naveen is up to now that he is no longer at Intel.
Tweetables:
“Once we got acquired, we were actually put under a hiring freeze. It became very difficult, or ac-tually, impossible for us to hit any timelines, because we knew we had to grow by 50 people.” - @NaveenGRao [0:20:04]
“I think, if Intel doesn't react well enough to actually maintain the markets they have, NVIDIA is going to eat at them and that's what they're going to do with Arm. That's really going to be painful.” - @NaveenGRao [0:47:18]
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I have no idea what they are talking about but they sound smart
What is the ticker?
Yes! Stephen Jurvetson is one of my heroes. Demonstrating his legendary insight again there... S Naveen Rao has an amazing story! Super interesting podcast, thanks!!
Ark keep showing the way, leading the cusp of innovation!
This is great thank you for posting
Will AI ever design its own chip to make itself smarter or better?
The future is very exciting! I worked in electronics for 30 years. I actually worked for QCOM before it was QCOM. Can I invest in Nerana yet?
C3? that is a joke of a company. Flawed biz model, poor concentration of uninspiring customers, terrible decleration of growth at a low revenue already. But hey, ignorance is bliss and buzz words rule the day. Just don't get you portfolio disrupted by a pretender.
Couldn’t be really say Tesla is the first day AI chip start up .. They did ditch Nvidia to create their own design and is currently leveraged in their automobiles
Love this video keep them coming
Doesn’t Tesla have their own artificial intelligence thing?
Yes they created their own chip Because Nvidia could not meet their needs
Let’s gooo!!!!
Nice
Awesome
Preach it!
At 6:38 he uses the term "recapitulate". What does he mean ? The only definition I find for Capitulate is surrender.
Recapitulate is the long form of "recap" as in to sum up, though i think in this context he actually meant recapture.
Good dialogue, but there is no way NVDA will be allowed to acquire ARM. Not sure why you don't want to address that in your assumption about what NVDA will do with ARM
I disagree. I see major changes coming in the next year or two. And it all has to do with competing with China. I think we will see M&A’s that no one EVER thought would happen. Larger companies can and will have greater leverage, more R&D, deeper capacity to innovate and improve. I get it, no one likes a monopoly. But it comes down to ‘who do we fear more?’
A slightly monopolistic American tech company? Or ALL tech eventually coming from Asia?
Maybe I’m wrong. Only time can tell.
And it’s not like there isn’t other competition. Apple. Intel. Micron. Qualcomm. Google. Etc
Is anyone buying INTEL then?
the first part of this call would tell you they have terrible management as they allowed something they just acquired to go into stagnation with a hiring freeze.