The release of ChatGPT in November 2022 sparked a new wave of AI companies. It also brought attention to the companies that were already building in the space like Etched.
Etched co-founder and CEO Gavin Uberti said on a recent episode of TechCrunch’s Found podcast that his company “stands on the shoulders of giants.” While the company got the idea to build chips focused on transformer models months before the AI boom began in November 2022, it still played a big role in getting the company off the ground.
“When we started out, GPT three was still very unique, a very differentiated kind of product, and I could not fathom why folks weren’t talking about it,” Uberti said. “But ChatGPT kind of changed that. It put a great user interface, put a great kind of application onto these language models, and showed folks that, yes, there is demand for half a million tokens a second for one of these big models.”
That November launch sparked enough investor interest in AI to prompt Etched to raise a seed round and start building. The company has since raised more than $125 million in venture funding. Etched’s chips aren’t yet on the market but Uberti talked about how being first movers in the transformer space gives them a leg up.
“I think it’s a matter of time before Nvidia and Google and hyper scalers begin to compete,” Uberti said. “But the fact is, it’s too late. I think we have more than an 18-month head start on them, and we’re going to get to market way earlier.”
He also compared the making of these chips to something similar that happened in Bitcoin mining.
“Whether or not you’re a fan of crypto currency, the Bitcoin mining ASIC companies have been able to do quite well for themselves,” Uberti said. “They make the chips that mine Bitcoin; although they don’t run them, they sell them to other parties. And back in the day, these weren’t the thing yet, and Bitcoin used to be mined on GPUs, but the moment that the first ASICs came out, they were better than GPUs by an order of magnitude.”
Uberti also talked about the actual building of Etched. He talked about dropping out of Harvard to build the company and what it has been like being a CEO and trying to hire for such a complex area. He also talked about any area of company formation we don’t often hear about: when to set up benefits for your employees, after his company realized they had definitely done so too late.