AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon
https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/08/06/amd-acquires-ai-chip-startup-taalas-to-boost-inference-performance-by-etching-models-into-silicon/5284344Baking models onto silicon would've been the next logical move to get a moat.
Google is already doing this and has an experimental project on top of already having TPUs and cramming their quantized flash onto individual TPUs for inference.
Now maybe. When models are flying passenger aircraft, other prerogatives will assert themselves. When a 50TB ROM means you can impulse purchase a ChatGPT 6.3 xhigh that runs on batteries, yet more use cases will be apparent.
*(It's local: private files managing firm oriented. It's blazing fast: it can be placed into recursive, intensive local workflows.)
It’s like talking about anything else than Megapixels when everyone was convinced that megapixels must go up in certain periods of the smartphone boom.
Update the model? Customers have to buy the new daughterboard, giving you a persistent income stream. Update the meta-architecture? You sell a new ASIC. Congratulations, you now dropped the capex for trillion-parameter models down from the price of a house, to the price of a normal computer peripheral.
Think vision, spatial reasoning, speech synthesis, even some speech analysis. Think self-driving cars (and drones) that need 10x less power for the brain, and can think at 10x situation per second.
It also mostly passes the "schlong" test
Oxford also claim that its first recorded use was from the 60s, not the 20s; https://www.oed.com/dictionary/schlong_n?tl=true
It's also a question I have found will cause models that don't know what it is to go off quickly in a direction of hallucination trying to explain it, so the hallucination is evident very quickly starting from the first ever prompt issued with 0 context fill. Example: I had a model write four detailed supposedly-accurate sounding, grammatically correct paragraphs saying its origin is from AAVE (African American Vernacular English), which it most certainly is not
You could do the same by picking any topic that is very rarely discussed in conversation, some esoteric and narrow piece of knowledge and asking the model about it.
[0] Incompressible Knowledge Probes: Estimating Black-Box LLM Parameter Counts via Factual Capacity [https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.24827]
I tried to explain but I fear were probably going to be adding artificial sleeps to these things to convince the masses it's doing something clever.
The characters in the 3-act Shakespearean play had very little depth, many of the names were similar, and they were not very smart, but the simple plot was cohesive.
It’s going to be really crazy when the bottle neck for agents is the speed of the tool calls rather than the speed of inference. Imagine an agent interacting with the terminal near instantly…
https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B
As I remember just about any english language model from mid 2024 and earlier didn't even do well if you asked it to count sequentially from 0 to 100, nevermind calculating stuff.
There’s no difference in the inference implementation, parameter count, or speed.
Guess we can look forward to picking these up ex-enterprise on ebay for under $5k a pop in a decade or two
In Aug 2025 you had
- OpenAI o3
- Opus 4.1
- Gemini 2.5 Pro
- Grok 4
Even if those were almost free to run, you'd be way better off with Deepseek flash 0731 or GPT 5.6 Luna, which already are almost free.
Other than for things where the t/s are critical, it seems like a bad idea to etch a model into silicon.
Caveats stacked high, obviously. It's 3.16M parameters (tinystories, and I also have a kevin-speak lemmatised version), the tokens are characters, and the 60k record is 16 streams that each remember exactly one token of context, so it's blisteringly fast at saying nothing. The honest build with full context and KV caching still does ~19k tok/s on one stream though.
I keep messing with the blogpost with the live demo, but I'm planning on flipping it to live in the next day or two
Would it be realistic for a frontier lab to deploy this or would the turnaround time mean the model is always too out of date?
Assuming the weights and architecture are eventually stable, how much cheaper would this end up being?
Claude Code is still using haiku 4.5 from ages ago for explore subagents for instance. Not to mention production uses like customer service that only need to be "good enough"
I guess losing some customers due to poor customer service is ok if the price of customer service is right.
6 months or even a year if something goes wrong in the fabrication process and you need to update things.
If they do more standard asic design, it could be a lot longer as the design needs to be validated on an FPGA cluster, which would necessarily need to be very big for something like a LLM. Easily up to 2 years.
There's a reason chatjimmy isn't demonstrating newer models and why they only show of an 8B model.
At the time people were no doubt saying yes but now 3.8 is out, is that still desirable?
My partner has been asking for a “completely private” model for doing research and shifting through volumes of data that can’t leave the office and $$$ for the current hardware makes no sense. It would be an easy sell if someone walks in with a black box that contains “ChatGPT”.
You need to be able to add|mul where the data (the weights) are stored.
If tolerant, they could churn out many cheaper chips, some perhaps with slight abnormal tendencies ;)
Extremely! You can remove entire layers and the model will still work just fine, with barely perceptible capability losses.
I've cut/bypassed ~15% of total parameters out of Gemma 4 31B on a pod once. Still got perfectly coherent responses out of it. Certain layers are a lot more important than others, particularly early and late ones; but it's honestly astonishing how much can be cut out from the middle without destroying the model's coherence.
I didn't run any meaningful benchmarks, so I have no idea what the capability loss looks like exactly. But "produce coherent and sensible English in response to a wide variety of prompts" was definitely not among the things the model unlearned.
> Our second model, still based on Taalas’ first-generation silicon platform (HC1), will be a mid-sized reasoning LLM