On this week’s episode of Free Lunch by The Peak, we sat down with Chris Walker, the CEO of Canadian AI chip maker, Untether AI, to talk about the future of the industry.
What is the hardware that underpins artificial intelligence?
“Data centres — filled with towers of computers larger than we are — hold massive amounts of memory in things called graphics processing units. These were initially created to run graphics for things like video games, but now we use them to train and run AI models.”
Is the chip market moving towards specialization?
“The history of computing has been specialization, to generalization, to specialization. As we look at how AI gets deployed, there will be a need for more specialization and purpose-built architectures to help make workloads happen at a high level of efficiency and effectiveness.”
Why has Untether decided to stay in Canada?
“We are a global company. We have people in Asia, Europe, Silicon Valley. But we were founded in Canada, and we’ve stayed because of the talent that’s available here. At the heart of it is that there's this amazing university system that is building a talent pool in AI.”
This interview has been edited for clarity and length. Listen to the full conversation here.