Can’t afford $300k for AI chips? New model for SEA cuts high costs

There is a saying that goes, “During a gold rush, sell shovels.”

No one has learned that better than the semiconductor industry. The price of graphical processing units (GPUs) – the shovels of the AI age – has skyrocketed since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022.

While the AI industry’s Magnificent Seven – which includes Google, Microsoft, and Meta – can afford to spend billions, many startups can no longer afford to dig.

Eugene Cheah says he doesn’t want to see that happen.

“I want to make sure that AI is accessible for everyone else in the rest of Southeast Asia,” he tells Tech in Asia. Cheah is the chairman of Recursal.ai, an open-source AI platform that has developed a new model called receptance weighted key value (RWKV).

Recursal founder and CEO Eugene Cheah / Photo credit: Eugene Cheah

He was previously the co-founder and chief technology officer of Uilicious, a low-code test automation tool.

RWKV combines recurrent neural network (RNN) technology with elements of generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) – a type of large language model (LLM) like ChatGPT – to provide an AI model that runs easily on low-end devices.

While most people associate AI with the likes of ChatGPT for individuals, enterprise AI is software integrated and built to support the functions of businesses. It can be used for data collection, analysis, and automation of tasks, among others.

In short, RWKV is an AI model that can run enterprise-level software without the costs associated with high-end computer chips. It can even run an AI model with 7 billion parameters on 12 GB of RAM – the same GPUs used for playing video games, Cheah says.

That reduces the cost that firms spend on AI chips to hundreds of dollars instead of thousands.

These more efficient AI models mean that startups no longer need to run to the cloud, Cheah says.

For businesses using GPT technology to develop AI, costs have soared due to high computation expenses and the escalating prices of AI chips and related hardware. As a result, AI development is becoming affordable only to deep-pocketed players.

So can the RWKV model compete with the LLMs from the AI industry’s Magnificent Seven?

Lower costs = AI accessibility

Running to the cloud

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