ASIC
topic on 4 shows · 8 statements across 7 episodes
the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 
Latent Space 
the a16z Podcast 
20VC
8 statements about ASIC, every show
Casado: Multibillion-dollar AI training costs justify building per-model custom ASICs
“Today to build a frontier model costs, let's say, three to five billion dollars, right? So, and let's, you know, and that's to train it. And so the inference has to pay back at least that. Of course, right? You know, in order for any of this stuff to be viable…”
Custom $50B ASICs become economically rational for $500B AI training runs
“If you have a trillion dollar or five hundred billion dollar training run, then take fifty billion of that and make an ASIC. Like, it's fine. Like you will get more than 10% efficiency from the ASIC. And like, that makes sense.”
Chaubard: Chip specialization and ASICs will proliferate across AI workloads
“From my vantage point, we're gonna see this proliferation, and where we have sufficient demand now, because there's so much demand for tokens, Where it makes sense to specialize at the chip level that will pay out and allow you to go through the full new produ…”
Haneke: ASIC verification takes 3 to 4 times more resources than design
“My understanding is that the industry standard for design to verification in ASIC ASIC project is like one to three, one to four.”
Hyperscalers with fixed architectures should build custom AI inference ASICs
“If I was sort of in house, maybe XAI is a good example of this, or Microsoft is another one where they kind of know the model architecture a priori then they absolutely should make an ASIC that is custom designed for that model architecture that they're curren…”
AI labs will increasingly co-design models alongside proprietary custom inference ASICs
“I definitely think things are moving towards you design a model. It's sized the way that fits well on hardware that you can design. You immediately start creating an inference hardware that is custom made to fit the sizes of your model. And then you can also s…”
Morin: China's domestic AI chips currently match Nvidia's A100 capability
“They're a bit late in terms of, you know, ASIC. There are like A-one-hundred level”