AI will make chip design faster. It won't make chips easier. I sat down with Raghu Raghuram and Guido Appenzeller at a16z to talk about what's really constraining the AI buildout. It's not just compute.
1) Silicon still takes quarters to manufacture, no matter how fast we design
2) Memory bandwidth and advanced packaging are huge choke points
3) Copper is giving way to optical
4) Energy capacity is becoming economic capacity
I also think today's explosion of specialized AI chips will consolidate around fewer architectures. And I'd love to see what a "VMware for agents" looks like when infrastructure is built for them instead of for us.
Full conversation at the link. Thank you Raghu and Guido – always great to talk with you!