AMD Acquires Taalas to Print AI Models in Silicon
I'm still trying to wrap my head around Taalas' approach to AI hardware - they don't make chips that run AI models, they physically print the model's weights into silicon. It's a wildly different approach, and one that AMD is now betting billions on. The idea is that by baking the model's weights directly into the chip, you can boost inference performance by an order of magnitude or more. That's a pretty bold claim, and it's not hard to see why AMD would be interested in getting in on the action. What's really interesting about Taalas' tech is that it doesn't rely on HBM to store model weights - instead, it etches them directly into the silicon. This means that Taalas' chips are essentially model-specific integrated circuits, or MSICs. It's a bespoke approach that could potentially offer huge performance gains, but it also raises some questions about flexibility and adaptability. I mean, if you're printing the model's ...