VCs plow $475M into Unconventional AI to make datacenter power problems go away

Interview Naveen Rao founded AI businesses and sold them to Intel and Databricks. He’s now turned his attention to satisfying AI's thirst for power and believes his new company, Unconventional AI, can do it by building chips inspired by nature.

On Monday, Rao revealed Unconventional AI raised $475 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, Jeff Bezos, and others, to answer the question.

"AI is intrinsically linked to hardware and hardware is intrinsically linked to power. We can't scale beyond a certain number of inferences per unit time because of the energy problem. We can't produce that much more energy in the next 10 years," Rao told The Register.

With Unconventional AI, Rao makes the case we're using the wrong tools for the job.

"Natural learning systems never used numerics. They didn't simulate the dynamics of learning. They use the intrinsic physics of ...