On AI:AM

Jay Dawani

Co-Founder & CEO, Lemurian Labs

Jay Dawani is co-founder and CEO of Lemurian Labs and the author of Hands-On Mathematics for Deep Learning. He started Lemurian in 2022 as an AI chip company built around a novel logarithmic number format, then cancelled the silicon on the argument that there are already enough hardware companies. The roughly three dozen people there now build Tachyon, a compiler and runtime that takes a PyTorch model and targets NVIDIA, AMD or Intel — a bet that CUDA’s moat is a software problem, and that the win comes from optimizing data movement across a whole workload rather than making each kernel fast.