CEO @unconvai. Former CEO MosaicML/Databricks & Nervana/IntelAI. Neuro + CS. I like to build stuff that will eventually learn how to build other stuff.
A dirty secret of many of chip startups right now: the apparent demand they see for their products has little to do with innovation of the product. It's simply a supply of FLOPs and memory. As long as the product is in the basic zip code to serve current models, and they have silicon supply, they will have business.
It's not that they are so much better than Nvidia (they aren't) that they are outcompeting them; the startups are simply soaking up the demand that Nvidia can't supply.