Etched co-founders Robert Watchen, Gavin Uberti, and Chris Zhu
Etched
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.
A 2-year-old startup founded by Harvard dropouts has just raised $120 million in venture funding to try and build a competitive chip and take on Nvidia in artificial intelligence.
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 OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Co-founder and CEO Gavin Uberti said that as AI develops, most of the technology’s 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.
“We’re making the biggest bet in AI,” Uberti said in an interview. “If transformers go away, we’ll die. But if they stick around, we’re the biggest company of all time.”
Uberti and his co-founders are aware that it’s a high-risk wager, and that they’re going up against some of the most richly capitalized and competitive companies on the planet. While $120 million is a lot of money to raise in a series A, it’s about how much Nvidia generates in revenue in half a day. Nvidia’s sales have more than tripled annually for three consecutive quarters, topping $26 billion in the latest period.
Nvidia has more than 80% of the market share for AI chips, according to estimates. Etched is among a group of startups attracting capital to go after the burgeoning opportunity. Primary Venture Partners led the round. Peter Thiel, Stanley Druckenmiller and Cruise founder Kyle Vogt are also backers.
Despite Nvidia’s head start and, what some developers describe a moat, new chipmakers are plowing ahead anyway, mainly because the opportunity is so big. Other chip startups taking on Nvidia include Cerebras Systems, which is building a physically larger AI chip, and Tenstorrent, which is using a trendy technology called RISC-V to build AI chips.
“The reason we were so excited about what we’re doing, why we dropped out of school and we’ve convinced so many people to leave these chip projects — this is the most important thing to be working on,” said Robert Wachen, Etched’s operating chief. “The entire future of technology is going to be shaped by whether the infrastructure can handle the scale.”
Semiconductors have traditionally been one of the hardest industries for startups given the long development cycles, the significant capital required to build a chip and the need to engage with a limited number of manufacturing partners, such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which is building Etched’s chip.
Venture capitalists invested $6 billion in AI semiconductor companies in 2023, up slightly from $5.7 billion in 2022, according to data from PitchBook.
Hard coded
Etched’s Sohu chip
Uberti and Chris Zhu started to work on a chip company after Uberti did a summer internship working on compliers. That put him in contact with the low-level hardware ideas that led to Etched.
The pair dropped out of Harvard in 2022, and added Uberti’s college roommate, Wachen. They quickly started hiring chip industry veterans. The company settled in Cupertino, and now has 35 employees. It offers housing stipends to new hires.
“When ChatGPT came out, and Nvidia stock exploded, and especially when every other model coming out would be a transformer too, we found ourselves in the right place at the right time,” Uberti said.
Etched is preparing to bring Sohu to market, and the founders say they’ll be ready to show something later this year. The startup is also working to secure customers and says that technology companies are eager to check out new AI chips.
For the business to work, companies that are spending billions of dollars on GPUs will need to see some significant savings in building custom chips designed for their specific AI model and be willing to make trade-offs in flexibility.
By specializing on transformers, which moves data in predictable ways from the chip to memory, Etched’s Sohu chip can dedicate less space to memory and more to the kinds of transistors that define a chip’s raw computing power, Uberti said.
Another aspect of Eteched’s efficiency is that the chip has one large core. That results in fewer inefficient calculations done by a part called a streaming multiprocessor to coordinate calculations by different cores.
Uberti says the impact of specialized AI chips could be similar to how custom chips called ASICs, first introduced in 2013 specifically for mining bitcoin or ether, reduced the demand for Nvidia GPUs.
The Etched founders expect the need for chips to run these models will increase, especially once they’re used to serve AI software millions of times per minute.
They also say that by hard coding the AI architecture into the chip, their device can reduce the latency of returning answers, unlocking new use cases, such as AI agents or real-time voice conversations. Etched says its chips are more than 10 times faster than Nvidia’s GPUs, thanks to its simpler architecture and single use case.
But Etched is taking on some of the most valuable companies in the world, including Nvidia, which have massive development teams and access to the capital needed to secure production and improve their chips on an annual basis.
Etched, which has a countdown timer displayed in its headquarters, has to move faster.
“The way that we’re going to win this specialized AI chip market, and the ones after this, is by being the first product to market,” Uberti said.
Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg plans to visit South Korea, scheduling key meetings during the trip, according to a statement by Meta on Wednesday, which did not provide further details. Reportedly, Zuckerberg is anticipated to meet with Samsung Electronics chairman Jay Y. Lee later this month to discuss AI chip supply and other generative AI issues, as per the South Korean newspaper Seoul Economic Daily, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter.
Alex Wong | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Meta extended its ban on new political ads on Facebook and Instagram past Election Day in the U.S.
The social media giant announced the political ads policy update on Monday, extending its ban on new political ads past Tuesday, the original end date for the restriction period.
Meta did not specify the day it will lift the restriction, saying only that the ad blocking will continue “until later this week.” The company did not say why it extended the political advertising restriction period.
The company announced in August that any political ads that ran at least once before Oct. 29 would still be allowed to run on Meta’s services in the final week before Election Day. Other political ads will not be allowed to run.
Organization with eligible ads will have “limited editing capabilities” while the restriction is still in place, Meta said. Those advertisers will be allowed to make scheduling, budgeting and bidding-related changes to their political ads, Meta said.
Meta enacted the same policy in 2020. The company said the policy is in place because “we recognize there may not be enough time to contest new claims made in ads.”
Google-parent Alphabet announced a similar ad policy update last month, saying it would pause ads relating to U.S. elections from running in the U.S. after the last polls close on Tuesday. Alphabet said it would notify advertisers when it lifts the pause.
Nearly $1 billion has been spent on political ads over the last week, with the bulk of the money spent on down-ballot races throughout the U.S., according to data from advertising analytics firm AdImpact.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, attends the 54th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, January 18, 2024 (L), and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos speaks during the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland, Britain, November 2, 2021.
Reuters
Physical Intelligence, a robot startup based in San Francisco, has raised $400 million at a $2.4 billion post-money valuation, the company confirmed Monday to CNBC.
Investors included Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, OpenAI, Thrive Capital and Lux Capital, a Physical Intelligence spokesperson said. Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital are also listed as investors on the company’s website.
Physical Intelligence’s new valuation is about six times that of its March seed round, which reportedly came in at $70 million with a $400 million valuation. Its current roster of employees includes alumni of Tesla, Google DeepMind and X.
The startup focuses on “bringing general-purpose AI into the physical world,” per its website, and it aims to do this by developing large-scale artificial intelligence models and algorithms to power robots. The startup spent the past eight months developing a “general-purpose” AI model for robots, the company wrote in a blog post. Physical Intelligence hopes that model will be the first step toward its ultimate goal of developing artificial general intelligence. AGI is a term used to describe AI technology that equals or surpasses human intellect on a wide range of tasks.
Physical Intelligence’s vision is that one day users can “simply ask robots to perform any task they want, just like they can ask large language models (LLMs) and chatbot assistants,” the startup wrote in the blog post. In case studies, Physical Intelligence details how its tech could allow a robot to do laundry, bus tables or assemble a box.
To Barry Diller, a friend of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the decision for The Washington Post not to endorse a candidate in tomorrow’s presidential election was “absolutely principled” — and poorly timed, he said Monday on CNBC’s Squawk Box.
“They made a blunder — it should’ve happened months before, and it didn’t, and that’s the issue with it,” Diller said.
Diller is chairperson of both online travel company Expedia and IAC, which owns media platforms and websites like Dotdash Meredith and Care.com. He and Bezos appear to have been close friends for years, with Diller and his wife, fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, hosting Bezos’s engagement party to fiancee Lauren Sanchez.
The decision not to endorse a presidential candidate in the 2024 race or for future presidential races came directly from Bezos, the paper’s owner, according to an article published by two of the Post’s own reporters.
The move prompted public condemnation from several staff writers, a flood of at least 250,000 digital subscription cancellations and the resignations of at least three editorial board members.
Bezos defended his position in his own op-ed late last month, calling the move a “meaningful step in the right direction” to restore low public trust in media and journalism.
“Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” Bezos wrote, emphasizing that the decision to not endorse a candidate was made “entirely internally” and without consulting either campaign. “I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it.”
Diller said he spoke to Bezos following the decision.
“I think it was absolutely principled,” Diller said. “The mistake they made — and it was a mistake admitted by him — was timing.”