I think AI is the next evolution of humanity. I think it takes us to a new level, allows us to collaborate and understand the world in much deeper ways. Naveen Rao is here's an expert in AI. Nizene Rao, probably one of the smartest guys in this domain. He sees things well before anybody else sees them. You had a lot of success doing Nirvana Mosaic and Databricks. Why start a new chip company now? First off, not a chip

company per se. Most of what we're doing is really kind of looking at first principles of how

learning works at physical system. Invidia, TSMC, Google, are these potential allies for unconventional,

are these competitors? I think TSM is absolutely going to be a partner. Google kind of has

everything internally. And Invidia, of course, they've built the platform that everyone programs on today. So are we going to be at odds with NVIDIA going for? I don't know. We'll see what the world looks like, but there could be a world where we collaborate. Has anyone called you crazy yet for doing this? Oh, yeah, plenty of people. A squirrel brain runs on a tenth of a watt.

Our AI data centers now consume 4% of the entire US power grid, and we need 400 more

gigawatts in the next decade just to keep up.

Neveen Rao thinks the problem isn't power generation.

It's that we've been building the wrong kind of computer for 80 years.

Neveen sold his last AI chip company to Intel, and now he's back with a bet most people

call crazy.

Analog computing, purpose built for intelligence.

In this conversation, A16Z's Matt Borenstein sits down with the Novin to discuss why

now is the time for this unconventional bet.

Our guest today is Naveen Rao, co-founder and CEO of Unconventional AI, which is an AI chip

startup. Prior to that, Navine was at Databricks as head of AI and co-founder of two successful

companies, Mosaic in the cloud computing world and Nirvana doing AI chip accelerators before it was cool.

We're here reporting from Nureps, and great to have you on the podcast, maybe welcome.

Thanks. Thanks for having me.

So you were kind of at the vanguard thinking about what the proper hardware is for running AI workloads.

Absolutely. I mean, you know, it's like when you have a hammer, everything's a nail, I suppose.

But the early part of my career was really about how do I take certain algorithms and capabilities and shrink them, make them faster, put them into form factors that make those use cases proliferate, like wireless technology or video compression. You couldn't do video compression real time on a laptop back then. There wasn't enough computing power. So you actually needed to build hardware to those kind of thing. So early part of my career was all about that. And then I went back to academia, did a PhD in neuroscience. And so you still kind of look at it like, hey, can I make something better? It's more efficient. And so you sold Nirvana to Intel and then founded Mosaic, which is a cloud company. It's interesting to sort of cross domains like that, I think, to be able to look at hardware and software. I would sort of argue Mosaic was really a software company. How did you make that decision? And why do you think you have these diverse interests? Well, I think I was, I don't know, I guess you can call it an OG kind of full stack. Now, full stack engineer means something different that it meant back then. I think back then someone who understands potentially devices like silicon, how to do logic design, computer architecture, low level software, maybe OS level software, and then application. That was a full stack engineer.

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