Recently, a Silicon Valley company Etched It is attracting attention. It is a company founded by two HarvardDropoutThey launched a product called SohuAI Chips, claiming that it is 20 times faster than Nvidia's current most powerful H100 chip when running AI models like ChatGPT. This news makes people wonder what kind of magical product Sohu has that can have such a huge impact on the AI hardware market.
Source Note: The image is generated by AI, and the image is authorized by Midjourney
Sohu's design concept is very special. Unlike Nvidia's GPU, Sohu uses a chip called an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC). This chip is optimized specifically for Transformer AI models. This means that Sohu cannot run other AI models such as convolutional neural networks (CNN), but it can provide ultra-high computing power when processing tasks such as ChatGPT, OpenAI's Sora, and Google's Gemini. This specialized design may allow developers to explore new products that were previously impossible, such as real-time translation applications that can instantly translate conversations between multiple languages.
When looking forward to the application prospects of Sohu, we can't help but think of its potential in multimodal processing. Sohu can not only process text, but also integrate images and language, which will open up new possibilities for visual question answering and other interactive applications. However, all this is still in the theoretical stage. Etched has successfully raised $120 million to promote the development of Sohu, but the actual release time is still undetermined.
It is worth mentioning that Etched said it has received tens of millions of dollars in hardware pre-orders and has reached a cooperation agreement with the world's leading TSMC to produce this 4-nanometer chip. For Etched, this deal will greatly boost their production capabilities and help them succeed in the market.
Etched's Sohu chip may revolutionize the AI industry, but we still have to wait and see whether this chip can deliver on its promise.