The release of ChatGPT in November 2022 sparked a new wave of AI companies. It also drew attention to companies that were already building in the space, like Etched.
Etched co-founder and CEO Gavin Uberti said in a recent episode of TechCrunch's podcast “Found” that his company is “standing on the shoulders of giants.” The company came up with the idea to develop a chip focused on the Transformer model a few months before the AI boom began in November 2022, but it still played a major role in the company's launch.
“When we started, GPT 3 was still a very unique, very differentiated kind of product, and we didn't understand why people weren't talking about it,” Uberti says, “But ChatGPT changed that. It provided a great user interface, it provided great kinds of applications for these language models, and it showed people that there was demand for 500,000 tokens per second for one of these large-scale models.”
The November announcement sparked investor interest in AI, and Etched started raising and building a seed round. The company has since raised more than $125 million in venture funding. While Etched's chips aren't on the market yet, Uberti talked about how being a pioneer in the transformer space gives it an advantage.
“I think it's only a matter of time before Nvidia, Google and the hyperscalers start competing,” Uberti says, “but it's actually too late. We're over 18 months ahead of them and I think we can get to market sooner.”
He also compared the production of these chips to something similar that happened with bitcoin mining.
“Whether you're a crypto fan or not, the bitcoin mining ASIC companies are doing pretty well,” Uberti said. “They're making chips that mine bitcoin, but instead of operating them, they sell them to other companies. Back then, this stuff wasn't trendy yet, and bitcoin was mined with GPUs, but the moment the first ASICs came out, they were orders of magnitude better than GPUs.”
Uberti also talked about the actual founding of Etched, including dropping out of Harvard to start a company and what it's like to hire in a complex field as a CEO. He also talked about an area of company founding that you don't hear much about: when to set up employee benefits after the company realized it was clearly too late.