Bloomberg's Ashley Vance recently profiled our portfolio company MatX. Per CEO Reiner Pope: "We design hardware tailored for LLMs, to deliver an order of magnitude more computing power so AI labs can make their models an order of magnitude smarter. Our hardware would make it possible to train GPT-4 and run ChatGPT, but on the budget of a small startup."
Here are some highlights from the Bloomberg article:
It’s taken about 25 years, but Silicon Valley finally feels like the old-school Silicon Valley again. Nvidia Corp. has so totally dominated the market for the chips that power artificial intelligence software that other companies have decided they’re willing to pursue the often-disastrous exercise of designing their own semiconductors. Yet the promise of AI is simply so great that people have decided they must try.
Two of these brave souls are Mike Gunter and Reiner Pope. They’ve founded a company, MatX, whose objective is to design silicon specifically for processing the data needed to fuel large language models. LLMs are the basis for things such as OpenAI Inc.’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, and they require an obscene amount of very expensive chips to run.
Nvidia’s dominance in the AI silicon market is something of an accident. MatX likely represents the beginning of yet another surge of chip startups focusing on LLMs from the ground up.
Read the full Bloomberg profile here.
