Ricursive Intelligence pitches AI-designed chips, aiming for week-long design cycles
Ricursive Intelligence co-founders Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt to describe a startup building AI that designs chips, learns from each iteration and improves subsequent designs, with the goal of automating and accelerating chip design. They said Ricursive optimizes entire chips rather than splitting them into dozens of smaller blocks, letting the AI produce intricate patterns such as wave-like layouts, with more details promised later. The founders cited AlphaChip, an AI system they previously developed, which produced a circular "donut-shaped" arrangement of components that initially surprised engineers but ultimately proved successful. Goldie said the industry consensus is that compute demand will grow at least 10,000x in five years, and argued for more efficient chips that use data-center bandwidth, wafers and fabs better rather than building 10,000 times more data centers; if a chip can be designed in about a week, custom chips for space, AR/VR and biological computing become financially viable.
The founders argue that AI-accelerated, more efficient chip design is a route to meeting projected sharp growth in compute demand without proportionally more data centers.
Ricursive Intelligence founders Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini believe more efficient AI chip design could help solve the compute crisis. The founders took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt on Wednesday to detail how their startup is developing AI that can design chips, learn from each iteration, and improve subsequent designs, all with the goal of automating and accelerating the chip design process.
“There is this understanding that in the next five years we are going to have at least 10,000x more demand for compute, and that’s somewhat potentially conservative,” Goldie said on stage. “So we don’t want to build 10,000 times more data centers. We think that we need to help by making chips that are more efficient, that use the bandwidth in those data centers more efficiently, that use the wafers and fabs more efficiently, because even if we make [data centers] in space or something, I don’t know, you won’t see the sun anymore.”
While some may be scared by the thought of AI designing its own chips, Goldie argues that letting AI handle chip design will allow humans to focus on developing applications and exploring new possibilities that can expand what they can accomplish with computing.
#Ricursive Intelligence#AlphaChip#Anna Goldie#Azalia Mirhoseini