Bezos-backed Unconventional AI addresses datacenter power \ stacker news ~AI

Startup wagers the path to sustainable AI might be found in nature’s most amazing design - the brain

Naveen Rao founded AI businesses and sold them to Intel and Databricks. He’s now turned his attention to satisfying AI's thirst for power and believes his new company, Unconventional AI, can do it by building chips inspired by nature.

On Monday, Rao revealed Unconventional AI raised $475 million in seed funding from Jeff Bezos, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, and others, to answer the question.

"AI is intrinsically linked to hardware and hardware is intrinsically linked to power. We can't scale beyond a certain number of inferences per unit time because of the energy problem. We can't produce that much more energy in the next 10 years," Rao told The Register.

With Unconventional AI, Rao makes the case we're using the wrong tools for the job.

"Natural learning systems never used numerics. They didn't simulate the dynamics of learning. They use the intrinsic physics of whatever substrate they're on to build a learning system," Rao said. "We believe we can recapitulate that behavior in silicon."

...read more at theregister.com

133 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 11h

"We're not going to have a product in two years," he said. "This is largely a research effort for the next several years, and we're really trying to crack a new paradigm."

This is interesting, and (if it works) blows a wide hole in the bigger = better narrative.