Naveen Rao
Co-founder and CEO, Unconventional AI. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutivescientistinvestor@NaveenGRao ↗LinkedIn ↗unconv.ai ↗
Naveen Rao is a serial AI entrepreneur and neuroscientist who co-founded Nervana Systems and MosaicML. He now serves as the co-founder and CEO of Unconventional AI, developing brain-inspired analog computing hardware to lower AI power consumption.
2shows
2appearances
40statements
8resolved
6supported
0contradicted
75%fully supported
1said about them ↓ Everything Naveen Rao said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Rao: Trillion-dollar GPU data centers are physically impossible to power
“None of this is physically realizable, right? That's what's really kind of annoying to me. I'm like, okay, you're talking about, you know, a trillion dollars of GPUs. Where the fuck are you gonna get the power for that? I'm sorry, right? Like you're just, you'…”
Rao: xAI's GPU clusters broke rules and are not repeatable
“And the things that have been realized I mean, like the XAI clusters and stuff like that, You know, valiant efforts. No doubt about it. And it's amazing to push through and get it done, but it broke a lot of rules and is doing a lot of stuff very inefficiently…”
Rao: Circular AI mega-deals are justified by coming demand
“I know we talk about it looks bad or whatever, but the bet is that the demand will come, and I think that's actually a good bet. So I see it as like, all right, fine, it looks, it doesn't look great in the short term, and I can see why people are irked by it b…”
Rao: True AI requires fundamental hardware substrate innovation
“My personal take is that we need innovation on the hardware substrate to actually build true intelligence. You're not going to get there with this sort of rudimentary thing that we have.”
Rao: Nervana Was Sold to Intel Too Early
“And so, you know, we sold too early. Sold to Intel too early.”
Rao: Unconventional AI Could Open a Computing Paradigm Lasting 80 Years
“I think we have the opportunity to completely open up a new paradigm that could exist for another 80 years.”
Rao: True hardware innovation requires exploiting non-linear silicon physics
“What's really interesting is if something is linear and predictable, it actually is very easy to simulate. If you can simulate in a digital system, it's less interesting. It turns out, like, silicon has all these beautiful physics that are associated with it. …”
Rao: Unconventional AI has very high chance of hitting 50x efficiency first go
“Are we going to hit a thousand X in the first go? Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. There's a some percentage chance that we will hit it, but I think we're going to hit 50 X with a very high chance.”
Rao: Deterministic digital silicon is ill-suited for stochastic neural networks
“A neural network is actually a stochastic machine, and so why are we using the substrate that is highly precise and deterministic? For something that's actually stochastic and distributed in nature.”
Rao: Unconventional AI can build analog circuits isomorphic to intelligence
“So we believe we can find the right isomorphism in electrical circuits that can subserve intelligence.”
Rao: Unconventional AI is building a substrate superior to matrix multiplication
“We are trying to build a better substrate than matrix multiply.”
Rao: MosaicML grew from $20M to over $700M at Databricks
“When I came there, we had about a twenty million dollar business, and it was, you know, seven or eight hundred million when I left, something like that. I think it's crossed well over a billion.”
Rao: Unconventional AI will probably need $1.5B for its first product
“I think to get to actual first product, it's probably a billion and a half is my guess. And it sounds like a huge number, but I think the opportunity is enormous. So this initial money will get us through much of the exploration and sort of a product, not prod…”
Rao: Company efficiency drops precipitously above 80 to 100 people
“Efficiency drops Really precipitously as you go over, like, 80 to a hundred people. That's what I've seen over and over again.”
Rao: Rat and human cortex microcircuits are virtually indistinguishable
“As a trained neuroscientist, I can look at the, what we call the cytoarchitecture, basically the cell structure of the cortex of a rat And a human, I can't tell the difference. So the human or the evolutionary biology version of Moore's law kind of ended about…”
Rao: The boundary between hardware and software is an arbitrary choice
“Software and hardware is, is not really a natural boundary. It's just where we decide to draw the line and say, okay, this is something I make configurable or I don't.”
Rao: Computer architecture has remained fundamentally unchanged for 80 years
“We've been building largely the same kind of computer for 80 years. We went digital back in the 19 forties”
Rao: Computing is currently constrained by energy at a global level
“We're at a point in time where computing is, is, is bound by energy at the global level, which just was never true in all of humanity.”
Rao: AI will require 400 GW of new power capacity over 10 years
“By some estimates, we need 400 gigawatts additional capacity over the next 10 years. To power the demand for AI.”
Rao: Dynamic substrates with physical time and causality are required for AGI
“My intuition says that anything where the basis is dynamic, which has time and causality as part of it will be a better basis than something that's not.”
Rao: Current AI models are nowhere close to AGI
“I don't think they're anywhere close to AGI because, I mean, they still make stupid errors. They're very useful tools, but they're not what, it's not like working with a person, right?”
Rao: Unconventional AI aims to build manufacturable analog chips within five years
“A couple of things that we set out to do when we built, we were starting this company was see if we can find a paradigm that's analogous to intelligence within five years. And then at the five year mark, we should be able to build something that's scalable fro…”
Rao: TSMC will partner with Unconventional AI for chip manufacturing
“TSMC is absolutely going to be a partner forward, you know, met with them recently and, you know, we want to work closely with them to make sure we get what we need, get fast turnaround times to prototype and all of that.”
The other half of the tape: Naveen Rao's own voice is left out of every number here. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Statements about Naveen Rao, by other people (1)
Barrett: Playground Backed Nervana for Writing Nvidia Microcode Better Than Nvidia
“We were lucky enough to host Naveen back in the day when it was Nirvana Systems, where we first invested because he, those guys were doing, before they had hardware, they were doing NVIDIA microcode better than NVIDIA was.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Naveen's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 a16zLEDGER | Co-founder and CEO, Unconventional AI | 1 | 23 | 75% 3/4 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |
 SOURCERYLEDGER | Co-founder and CEO, Unconventional AI | 1 | 17 | 75% 3/4 | full record on Sourcery → |