GrAI Matter Labs is at the very heart of where the hot stuff is happening right now. Artificial Intelligence, but with its own specific edge. “Life-Ready AI”, is what the company calls it. What that is? “We deliver brain-inspired chips that behave like humans do. AI that makes devices assist humans to act and react in real-time. AI that personalizes the human experience while maximizing efficiency, saving time, money, and vital natural resources.”
The Eindhoven, Silicon Valley, and Paris-based company aims to build a world where AI supports consumer electronics, robots, drones, autonomous vehicles, augmented reality glasses, surveillance cameras, “and much more” to make us more productive.
- The Gerard & Anton Awards ceremony highlights 10 promising start-ups each year.
- GrAI Matter Labs was one of the 2023 winners.
- This start-up offers “Life-Ready AI”: brain-inspired chips that behave like humans do.
The roots of GrAI Matter Labs date back to 2016, but it was in December 2017 that – thanks to a first funding round – the company really came to life. Menno Lindwer, GML’s VP of IP & Silicon, explains how the company grew from that moment to the global organization it is now. “Our goal is to design and market chips to benefit everyone from life-real artificial intelligence. Right now, only some big tech companies benefit from AI. We see that European governments have recently ‘woken up’ and started to see that it is strategically important to have such advanced chip manufacturing in-house as well.”
But Europe is not there yet, Lindwer notes. “It is still often the big foreign tech companies that have the knowledge, technology, and market. A major reason is that the technology currently only works well in the cloud or on very expensive chips. Moreover, using AI comes with major issues around real-time availability, speed, power consumption, and privacy. GML’s AI chips, on the other hand, are small and consume little power. They can therefore be used in all kinds of devices that people use every day. With them, they can perform complex AI tasks independent of the cloud, allowing everyone to benefit from advances in artificial intelligence. Our chips are very fast, making the use of AI fluid and smooth. And because no data needs to be transferred to the cloud, it can then be done with much less concern about privacy.”
Karaoke from your own Spotify list
There are a lot of industries that will need smooth real-time AI, Lindwer adds. “Right now, GML is mainly focused on high-volume consumer electronics. For example, we have shown that, through AI, we can split music into vocals and instrumentals, again in real-time. So you can, for example, create a karaoke system that allows you to sing directly to your favorite songs that come from your own Spotify account. But the same technology can also make dialogs in movies more intelligible. And we’ve shown that the technology can be used for video, ultra-sound, and robotics. The breadth of possible applications is enormous.”
GML’s roadmap still includes various challenges. For example, running AI tasks takes a lot of power. Those AI tasks will only get more complex in the foreseeable future. The improvements in chip technology today are too slow to keep up with that. So, other techniques are needed to make the ultimate goal (Life-Ready AI for all) attainable. Lindwer: “We have determined that this goal can only be achieved by taking advantage of all possible aspects of Sparsity: the fact that in today’s AI algorithms, there are many repetitive, redundant, or unnecessary data and operations. GML has recorded a number of inventions that allow us to filter out redundant data and computations effectively without reducing the quality of the AI. As a result, our chips need to do much less work than more traditional AI chips. And as a result, our chips are smaller, cheaper, and consume much less power.”
High Tech Campus
GrAI Matter Labs is located at the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven. This location offers excellent facilities, Lindwer notes. “In addition, here on the campus and in the broader Brainport environment, we collaborate with a whole range of companies. But also competitors, both in terms of product, talent, and funding. On the one hand, that is sometimes difficult. But mostly, it means we don’t have to look far for such things.”
This doesn’t mean everything is perfect, he adds. “Chip design and fabrication are time-consuming and expensive. It easily takes two years to make a chip, and AI chip design costs at least €10 million. We have found that the investment climate in Europe, the Netherlands, and Brainport is unsuitable for start-ups in this industry. Too little money is available. And investors seem to prefer to work with shorter-term propositions. Yes, European governments have now determined that in-house chip manufacturing is strategically important. A lot of government money is being put into that as well. But new factories is not enough. There must also be companies, like ours, that design, manufacture, and sell those chips on their own soil.”
As a winner in the ninth round of the Gerard & Anton Awards, GrAI Matter Labs is part of an already strong tradition. Which of the eighty former winners stands out for Menno Lindwer? “That would be Intrinsic-ID: we have greatly enjoyed working with them. Intrinsic-ID has been around longer and has proven itself. They provide good products with good documentation.”
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