With a mission to bring AI revolution to the industrial world, Sima.ai, a US-based AI chip startup has announced that the first-generation design of its AI chip based on TSMC 16nm technology has entered mass production. Sima.ai believes the conventional approach of using a one-size-fits-all chip for diverse applications like smart cars, drones, and advanced robotics has hindered innovation and hence their product MLSoC (Machine Learning System on a Chip) is designed specifically for edge computing.

“What we’re showcasing highlights the market potential for advancing the industrial world into the 21st century using AI and machine learning. These technologies have the power to drive significant improvements and advancements in the physical world,” Krishna Rangasayee, founder and CEO, SiMa.ai, told AIM. 

Even though the company has not revealed its roadmap, Rangasayee, validated to us that the startup is preparing for a generative AI embedded edge future. “It is something that is absolutely going to happen. In my mind, generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) will be a large component of everybody’s innovation, it doesn’t matter whether they are in the cloud, the edge or the mobile phones space,”  Rangasayee said.

Generative AI

In today’s age, generative AI has been transformative and is slowly making its way to the embedded edge space. What Rangasayee finds fascinating is that generative AI is gradually moving to real applications like enterprise and edge applications. “Somebody was telling me that before generative AI, maybe only 100 million people in the world had heard of AI, but now it’s more than a billion.”

Today, numerous enterprises are exploring the possibility of running LLMs on AI edge devices. Developers have successfully run generative AI models on edge devices. For example, earlier this year, developers at Qualcomm managed to run the text-to-image AI model Stable Diffusion on an Android phone, indicating a future of its widespread adoption. Given its growing significance, generative AI is expected to be embedded in everything and Sima.ai is preparing for such a future. 

Competition with NVIDIA

“Even though we compete with everybody, in the embedded edge space, our primary competitor would be NVIDIA,” Rangasayee said. NVIDIA has been at the forefront of the generative AI wave and is also one of its biggest beneficiaries. Riding the generative AI trend, the company is set to increase its revenue significantly.  

Previously, Rangasayee told AIM that their chips are 10x better than NVIDIA. He said that in computer vision, an important technical metric that customers value is frames per second per watt, measuring computational efficiency. We have a significant advantage in this regard, being at least 10 times ahead of competitors like NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and others.

“We have established our superiority in the embedded edge market. We further demonstrated our capabilities in our debut MLPerf Benchmark performance two months ago. In the closed-edge category, we clearly outperformed NVIDIA Volta in several benchmarks.”

“But kudos to them. They’ve done a fantastic job. We need to work very hard at convincing our customers that we are better. Even though we’re off to a good start, and I think now we’re publicly validated, we now need to show value to our customers.”

What attracted Sima.ai to India

For Sima.ai, India is a very important market. They have a research and development centre in Bangalore and employ around 60 personnel. “I’ll look at it in two dimensions, firstly the available talent pool and from an R&D perspective. I think the talent pool here can help us build products. Today, we are a team of 60 and we are going to continue to add to the team.”

Besides, Rangasayee also believes that the market opportunity in India is also immense. Currently, the startup has engaged with 10 customers here in India. “There are a lot of companies looking for a standardised edge computing platform that does a lot of different applications and we expect to touch 100 customers pretty soon in India. Here, everybody is very focused on wanting to adopt AI and ML and we are now showing them use cases and applications where they can leverage them.”

While Sima.ai was not able to reveal the names of their clients in India, Rangasayee did mention that Sima.ai’s customers are in robotics, drone manufacturers, and the electric vehicle space.