I think there is a comment somewhere here where I comment on NVIDIA, but I think NVIDIA is the best hardware company for making good software. We had a very niche software issue for which NVIDIA maintained open-source repos. I don't think NVIDIA's main advantage is its hardware, though; I think it's the software and the flexibility it brings to its hardware.
Suppose that Transformers die tomorrow, and Mamba becomes all the rage. The released Mamba code already has CUDA kernels for inference and training. Any of the CSPs or other NVIDIA GPU users can switch their entire software stack to train and inference Mamba models. Meanwhile, we'll be completely dead in the water with similar companies that made the same bet, like Etched.
You said (implied?) that your reason for starting a company was that you were waiting for somebody (MS) to build your favorite tech, and you realized it was monetizable. Finding a gap is a great start. But, if money is your goal, it is far easier to make money working at a company than starting one. Existing companies are great places to learn about technology, business, and the issues that should really drive your desire to start something yourself.
I don't think I ever implied we started this for money. We started working on the technology because it was exciting and enabled us to run LLMs locally. We wouldn't have started this company if someone else came along and did it, but we waited a month or two and didn't see anyone making progress. It just so happens that hardware is capital intensive, so making hardware means you need access to a lot of capital through grants (which Dartmouth didn't have for chip hardware) or venture capital (which we're going for now). I'm not sure where you got the idea we're doing this solely for money when I explicitly said "We were essentially nerd-sniped into working on this problem"
Glad to hear money isn't your focus. Your comment "...then we realized it was also monetizable" was the reason for my interpretation. Its also a very common rational. I don't know what "nerd-sniped" means, so...
Good luck with the VCs. I hope you all stay friends through the challenging process.
When performing performance optimization on CPUs, I was impressed with Intel's suite of tools (like VTUNE). NVIDIA has some unbelievable tools, like Nsys and, of course, its container registry (NGC), which I think surpasses even Intel's software support.
Suppose that Transformers die tomorrow, and Mamba becomes all the rage. The released Mamba code already has CUDA kernels for inference and training. Any of the CSPs or other NVIDIA GPU users can switch their entire software stack to train and inference Mamba models. Meanwhile, we'll be completely dead in the water with similar companies that made the same bet, like Etched.