Tenstorrent founder forms AI startup Taalas, raises $50 million
Taalas Inc. (Toronto, Ontario), a startup founded in 2023 by Ljubisa Bajic, Drago Ignjatovic, and Lejla Bajic, has raised US$50 million over two funding rounds led by Pierre Lamond and Quiet Capital.
Ljubisa Bajic founded Tenstorrent in 2016 and was joined soon after by Ignjatovic, and Lejla Bajic as engineering leaders. The team had previously spent decades working together on CPUs, GPUs and AI processors for AMD, Nvidia and Tenstorrent.
Tenstorrent, now led by Jim Keller as CEO, has a focus on bridging the RISC-V to AI gap (see Tenstorrent to help design 2nm edge AI accelerator in Japan)
The vision of Taalas is to develop an automated design flow that implements deep learning software models – Transformers, State Space Models, Diffusers, Mixture of Experts and others – directly in silicon.
“Commoditizing AI requires a 1000x improvement in computational power and efficiency, a goal that is unattainable via the current incremental approaches. The path forward is to realize that we should not be simulating intelligence on general-purpose computers, but casting intelligence directly into silicon. Implementing deep learning models in silicon is the straightest path to sustainable AI,” said Ljubisa Bajic, CEO of Taalas, in a statement.
Taalas said that one of its proprietary innovations enables one of its chips to hold an entire large AI model without requiring external memory. The efficiency of hard-wired computation enables a single chip to outperform a small GPU data center, opening the way to a 1000x improvement in the cost of AI.
“We believe the Taalas ‘direct-to-silicon’ foundry unlocks three fundamental breakthroughs: dramatically resetting the cost structure of AI today, viably enabling the next 10-100x growth in model size, and efficiently running powerful models locally on any consumer device,” said Matt Humphrey, Partner at Quiet Capital.
Taalas expects to tape-out its first large language model (LLM) chip in 3Q24 and to make it available to early-access customers in 1Q25.
Related links and articles:
News articles:
Tenstorrent to help design 2nm edge AI accelerator in Japan
Nvidia’s Q4 beats expectations on surging AI demand
Could SoftBank, OpenAI buy lossmaking Graphcore?
If you enjoyed this article, you will like the following ones: don't miss them by subscribing to :
