Reiner Pope of MatX on accelerating AI with transformer-optimized chips

Reiner Pope is the co-founder and CEO of MatX, designing specialized chips for Large Language Models. A former Google TPU architect, he joins John to discuss why the current generation of AI hardware is hitting a wall. They cover the "uncomfortable trade-off" between latency and throughput for current chips, why MatX is betting on combining HBM and SRAM to solve it, and the massive logistical challenge of manufacturing chips at scale with TSMC. Reiner also shares his predictions for AI in 2027, why he prefers Rust for hardware design, and why the best iteration loops happen in your head before writing a line of code. Full transcript on Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/cheekyp... Subscribe to Cheeky Pint Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2IHbGJJ... Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast... Substack: https://cheekypint.substack.com/ Key moments 00:00:15 Google’s AI revival 00:07:54 MatX 00:17:11 AI supply chain 00:21:48 Designing chips 00:37:11 TSMC 00:44:17 Token pricing 00:44:55 RL-ing chip design 00:49:26 Design to production 00:56:05 MatX culture 01:02:57 Rust 01:05:21 Cuckoo hashing 01:09:35 Unexplored model architectures