Software Has To Lead Hardware In The AI Dance

A lot of the people who are working at the many AI chip startups have a long history in processor development in the datacenter, and that is certainly true of the folks who founded SambaNova Systems. And this is a fortunate thing because these people can leverage some of the good ideas they know worked when commercializing a new technology and avoid some of the big mistakes their former employers sometimes made. At our recent The Next AI Platform event, we sat down with Rodrigo Liang, co-founder and chief executive officer of SambaNova Systems, which is one of the upstart custom AI chip producers vying for attention and budget dollars. SambaNova was founded in 2017 by a bunch of ex-Sun Microsystems techies as well as a few from Stanford University, which is of course where Sun itself was born in 1982. The co-founders include Kunle Olukotun and Chris Ré, professors at Stanford, with Olukotun being the leader of the Hydra chip multiprocessor research project and sometimes known as the father of the multicore processor.