Unconventional AI scores $475M to tackle AI's energy problem

"Interview 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 Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, Jeff Bezos, and others, to answer the question."

""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.""

Naveen Rao founded successful AI companies and now leads Unconventional AI to build nature-inspired chips to address AI's energy limits. The company raised $475 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, Jeff Bezos, and others. Rao argues current numeric simulations and conventional hardware cannot scale inference throughput due to energy constraints and limited future power availability. Unconventional AI intends to mimic biological learning by using substrate physics in silicon to implement learning dynamics more efficiently. Neuromorphic approaches aim to reverse-engineer brain mechanisms to reduce energy per inference, but prior prototypes remain far less efficient than biological brains.

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