Make you think... would it be possible to make an analog AI chip?
I.e.: burn the weights into resistors with a range of possible values, and do the sums through simply adding up the currents along parallel paths by simply connecting them!
The weights are mapped directly to transistors. It's not a generic processor, it's literally a dedicated Llama 8B chip that can't be used for anything else. When you specialize in hardware you get faster - Taalas is pushing that to the limit.
They seem to be doing well. I checked recently and their API is closed to signups due to overwhelming demand.
They built an entire wafer ASIC. The entire thing is one huge active ASIC.
it takes a lot of cool engineering and cooling to make it work, and is very cool.
No, it was a custom ASIC chip with weights baked in for a singular model. I do envision a future where we return to cartridges. Local AI is de facto and massively optimised chips are built to be plug and play running a single SoTA model.
