$21 billion AI chip upstart Etched questioned: performance has not been verified by a third party so far

Comparing the news, AI News, Etched has caught the attention of the chip community after having just completed $700 million at a valuation of 21 billion US dollars. The Tiny Corp, an AI computing team founded by famous hacker George Hotz, the team behind tinygrad, an open source deep learning framework, publicly questioned Etched's technical propaganda: there are many photos of investors, orders, and hardware, but too little data to actually verify performance. One of Etched's core selling points is LVI, which allows the chip to run AI inference at lower voltages. Etched claims that this allows the trillion-parameter sparse MoE to reach over 80% of its theoretical peak computing power. Chip design practitioner Wesley Yue questioned that a high ratio does not mean absolute performance is strong. MFU (model computing power utilization) measures the ratio of actual computational power to the theoretical peak. If the chip itself has lower peak computing power, even if the utilization rate reaches 80%, it may not be able to outperform its rivals. Etched has yet to disclose full FLOPs, power consumption, and third-party benchmarks. The official website still only writes that early customer tests have reached the leading level, and that detailed performance data will be published later. However, there is currently no evidence that Etched was a fraud. The Wall Street Journal and Reuters have both confirmed that their chips have been shipped. Jane Street got its first complete rack last month, and deployment has already begun. The biggest question now is not whether there is a chip or not, but whether this chip has been advertised that well.