College dropouts raise $120 million to take on Nvidias AI chips
Summary
Nvidia has been the hottest story on Wall Street of late, increasing eightfold in value since the end of 2022 and soaring past $3 trillion in market cap this month. Headquartered in Cupertino, California — home to Apple — Etched is developing a chip called Sohu, which the company says will be used to train and deploy AI models using "transformers," the core architecture underpinning advancements like OpenAIs ChatGPT. Co-founder and CEO Gavin Uberti said that as AI develops, most of the technologys power-hungry computing requirements will be filled by customized, hard-wired chips called ASICs. Their efficiency comes in executing only the AI model they were designed to perform, in contrast to general purpose graphics processing units (GPUs) from Nvidia that are more capable but are also much costlier. "The reason we were so excited about what were doing, why we dropped out of school and weve convinced so many people to leave these chip projects — this is the most important thing to be working on," said Robert Wachen, Etcheds operating chief.