Databricks’ former AI chief thinks he can cut AI’s power bill by 1,000x; plus, Klue may have solved one problem but have another
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What is Unconventional AI’s UNO model and why does it matter?
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The drive to discover the next big thing in AI has funded some pretty ambitious projects, but one company is taking it as a chance to rebuild computing architecture from the ground up. Led by Naveen Rao, formerly the head of AI at Databricks, Unconventional AI promises to make inference processing vastly more power efficient. The secret weapon
How does the oscillator‑based architecture claim to cut AI power use by 1,000×?
a new kind of oscillator-based computer architecture. On Thursday, the company released its first model AI called UNO, an image generation system tool that shows for the first time how the company's technology can replicate conventional AI systems. In an accompanying new paper, the company's research team detailed how they built a fully functional image generation model using a software simulation of the new architecture, one that performs just as well as state-of-the-art diffusion models. Rao told TechCrunch, This is the hello world of a new kind of computer. Over the next year, you're going to start seeing some pretty interesting news around this. The output for the new UNO model is similar to that of image generation models like Stable Diffusion or OpenAI's GPT Image 1.
The impressive part is how it arrives at that performance. The model is built on an oscillator-based architecture that is completely different from the chips that power conventional computing and traditional LLMs. The advantages of the oscillator-based computing are complex, but Rao believes it will ultimately reduce power use by as much as 1,000 times. Much of the infrastructure to get there is still being built.
What are the next steps for UN0’s hardware and inference stack?
The current version of UNO runs on a software simulation of unconventional oscillator chips, but the company plans to release schematics for an actual chip soon. From there, the plan is to build an entire inference stack from the ground up, with unconventional AI eventually supplying compute capacity just like any other provider. Ral said, We will build a new kind of system composed of our chips. We will run AI models there, and we will have a network cable where prompts come in and inferences go out. But it will be done at one thousandth of the power. It's a stunningly ambitious goal. Particularly for a company that still counts less than fifty employees. But given the scale of the AI build out and the anticipated cost of meeting the growing demand for inference, it may be one of the few efforts to meet the scale of the problem.
As Ral sees it, the available supply of power will be one of the hard limits for AI in the years to come, and unconventional is one of the few projects able to address it. Market research provider Clue, which was hacked earlier this month in a breach that allowed cyber criminals to steal reams of data belonging to several of its customers, said that it is communicating with the hackers.
Why does Databricks’ former AI chief see power supply as the biggest AI limit?
TechCrunch has also learned that the company believes that the group is deleting the stolen data. The company said we continue to communicate with the threat actor we have been in contact with, Icarus. Icarus told us they are taking steps to delete the data taken from Clue customers. The Icarus site remains down, and we have indications that Icarus is indeed taking steps to delete data taken from Clue customers. On Monday. Clue confirmed that hackers broke into its system on June twelfth and stole an unspecified amount of data from an unspecified number of its customers. Since then, several clue customers have confirmed they were affected by the breach.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is Unconventional AI’s UNO model and why does it matter?
0:02–1:09
2
How does the oscillator‑based architecture claim to cut AI power use by 1,000×?
1:09–2:29
3
What are the next steps for UN0’s hardware and inference stack?
2:29–3:51
4
Why does Databricks’ former AI chief see power supply as the biggest AI limit?
3:51–4:49
5
What happened in the Clue data breach and how is the Icarus group responding?
4:49–5:58
6
Is a second hacker gang threatening Clue customers with ransom, and what should victims do?
5:58–7:05
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from TechCrunch Industry News
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