An AI Chip Armageddon is Coming; Biden Punts on Open-Source LLMs

David Bennett, chief customer officer at Tenstorrent. Photo courtesy of Tenstorrent.

When I asked David Bennett, the chief customer officer of AI hardware developer Tenstorrent, about the future of startups like his, he was blunt: Most will go out of business.

To survive, he recommends startups remain flexible and avoid boxing themselves into any narrow use case. Bennett isn’t referring to some niche market, but rather, a wide-ranging group of tens of companies, from SiMa.ai to Cerebras, which have collectively raised billions of dollars in venture capital to take on market leader Nvidia.

The executive knows what he's talking about. He previously spent over a decade in sales at chipmaker AMD. And his current employer, Tenstorrent, is led by CEO Jim Keller, a hardware legend who developed Apple’s A4 and A5 processors that powered the iPhone 4 and iPad 2, and oversaw Tesla’s Autopilot hardware efforts from 2016 to 2018.