Tapa Ghosh on AI chips, studying your field, and collective self-belief

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The Scaling Era

Oscar Hong

5 episodes

1 week ago

Sam Altman calls current AI infra buildout the “biggest joint industrial project in human history.” Across the world, companies are building infrastructure with urgency: big tech spending hundreds of billions on data centers, semiconductor fabs investing as much in new capacity, energy providers signing multi-gigawatt power contracts to power AI clusters. The Scaling Era tells the stories behind this buildout. We talk to chip designers, roboticists, data center operators, and founders across the value chain—the builders whose efforts determine whether AI scales or stalls.

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Tapa Ghosh on AI chips, studying your field, and collective self-belief

The Scaling Era

54 minutes 16 seconds

8 months ago

Tapa Ghosh on AI chips, studying your field, and collective self-belief

Jeson and I interview Tapa Ghosh, the founder of Volantis Semi, which raised $5M from Open AI’s Sam Altman to build photonic motherboards for AI chips. Tapa's journey began with crashed drones, leading him to a hardware deep dive and giving a talk Stanford on designing 3D ICs for deep learning as a teenager.

We explore Volantis's approach to solving a key bottleneck in AI: latency and bandwidth in communication between chips. Tapa explains why using light instead of electricity could revolutionize AI infrastructure, and offers insights into the current landscape dominated by NVIDIA.

His perspectives on self-learning, team building, and resurfacing old ideas to solve new problems reveal what it’s like to work on the foundational layer to our AI future. Please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with Tapa Ghosh.

Timestamps:

(00:00:00) - Tapa’s origin story: How a crashed drone sparked an interest in chip design

(00:05:45) - How to speedrun to the frontiers of knowledge

(00:11:28) - Giving a talk at Stanford: Petascale Deep Learning on a Single Chip

(00:13:27) - Differences between CPUs, GPUs, and ASICs

(00:15:48) - How NVIDIA went from graphics to AI computing

(00:17:37) - Why AI workloads today are communication-bound, not compute-bound

(00:19:32) - Study the history of your field

(00:21:48) - Why Volantis is building a photonic motherboard

(00:25:48) - What he’s doing differently this time around vs. his last startup

(00:32:21) - The landscape of AI chips: NVIDIA, AMD, challengers

(00:38:10) - New problems as we continue to scale AI clusters for training & inference

(00:39:51) - What Moore’s Law teaches us about human psychology & coordination

(00:42:08) - The engineering marvel of semiconductor fabrication

(00:43:56) - Getting ignored by Intel vs. gifted pineapple cakes from TSMC

(00:48:46) - Other promising opportunities in AI hardware / infra

(00:52:44) - An open rabbithole he hopes to have an answer to by 2030