Bill Gates and Travis Kalanick invest in A.I. chip start-up using light to move data
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick’s 10100 fund and current Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi have invested in Luminous, a small start-up building an artificial intelligence chip.
The seven-person company’s goal is to build a chip that can substitute for 3,000 boards containing Google’s latest Tensor Processing Unit AI chips, or TPUs.
“We know this works because we already have working silicon,” Gomez said.
Google’s entry into the AI silicon business was itself a bold development. The company took matters into its own hands, rather than relying on the Nvidia graphics cards that have become popular among AI researchers for training AI models with vast supplies of data. Google’s public cloud now features its own TPUs; the company hasn’t started selling these chips to other companies.