Ricursive Intelligence wants AI to design the chips that power AI, and its founders say that shift could help ease a looming shortage of computing capacity. Co-founders Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini laid out the company’s approach on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt on Wednesday.

The startup is developing AI that can design chips, learn from each iteration and apply those lessons to later designs. The stated goal is to automate and accelerate the chip design process.

Goldie made the case that demand is the core problem. “There is this understanding that in the next five years we are going to have at least 10,000x more demand for compute, and that’s somewhat potentially conservative,” she said. Building 10,000 times more data centers is not the answer, she argued. Chips need to get better at what they do, using the bandwidth in data centers, along with wafers and fabs, more efficiently.

Goldie also said that AI-designed chips could change how fast new hardware reaches the market. Under traditional methods, she said, designing a new chip can take six months, a year or even two years, which forces companies to be highly selective about what they build. “But if you can design a chip in like a week,” she said, companies could design custom chips for many more applications, including space, AR and VR, and biological computing, and do so in a way that makes financial sense and uses less energy.

The founders say AI is also pushing chip design in directions human engineers might not have chosen. They point to AlphaChip, an AI system the founders developed earlier, which produced a circular, “donut-shaped” arrangement of chip components. Engineers were initially surprised by the layout, but it ultimately proved successful.

Ricursive is optimizing entire chips rather than following the conventional approach of splitting them into dozens of smaller blocks. That allows the AI to create intricate patterns, including wave-like designs. The founders said they plan to share more about those designs in the future.

Goldie framed the division of labor in simple terms. Humans supply the ideas, and AI handles execution. She said the same shift is happening in software development and other fields, and that Ricursive is applying it to chip design.

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