Co-founder & CEO, Unconventional AI
Search every verified Naveen Rao interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Naveen Rao, co-founder and CEO of Unconventional AI, has been publicly discussing his company's efforts to develop a new type of computer chip inspired by the human brain's energy efficiency. In recent appearances, he stated that the human brain operates on roughly 20 watts, while AI data centers consume megawatts, a gap he attributes to the energy cost of moving data between memory and compute units. Rao said his company is building a "physical dynamical computer" that performs computation in place, and he reported that a first prototype chip was taped out in June and has produced initial results, including generated images. He claimed the approach could be thousands or tens of thousands of times more efficient than existing chips. Rao also commented on the broader AI industry, saying that demand for GPUs currently outstrips supply and that energy availability will become a major constraint within the next few years. He described the current situation as analogous to being "on the Titanic and the iceberg is power generation." He expressed optimism about AI's future, describing himself as "the opposite of an AI doomer," and suggested that solving energy efficiency could enable applications such as large-scale robotics within 10 to 15 years. Rao has previously founded Nervana Systems and MosaicML, both of which were acquired, and he discussed his view that software's share of value creation may diminish over the next two decades relative to energy and hardware.
Naveen Rao's 20 watt brain claim just passed a live fact check, and the verdict is verified. Neuroscience sources in 2026 still cite roughly 20 watts for the human brain while AI data centers pull megawatts, which is exactly the gap Rao says pushed him to found Unconventional AI after Nervana and MosaicML. The same check confirms ENIAC landed in 1945 at the University of Pennsylvania and that SaaS rode cloud plus broadband plus APIs, not cloud alone, so Rao's stack history holds up layer by laye #Verified #NaveenRao #UnconventionalAI #BrainEnergy #DataCenterPower #FactChecked #NeuromorphicCom…
The All-In Summit returned to Los Angeles this year with one of its biggest lineups yet: Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Satya Nadella, Gwynne Shotwell, Jared Isaacman, Brad Gerstner, Bill Gurley, Dina Powell McCormick, Jake Paul, Nick Shirley, Blake Scholl, Martin Shkreli and more — alongside hosts Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks and David Friedberg. Over three days, some of the biggest names across technology, AI, investing, energy, space, media and politics came together for conversations about where the world is heading. Sourcery was on the ground asking founders, CEOs, inves…
Today's guest is Naveen Rao, co-founder and CEO of Unconventional AI. Naveen has built two startups before Unconventional AI, both at critical inflection points in the AI market, often early to trends the world had yet to see. He founded Nervana, acquired by Intel for over $400M, then MosaicML, acquired by Databricks for $1.3B, after which he led AI at Databricks. Now he's after his magnum opus: chips inspired by the architecture of the brain that can run AI at a fraction of today's energy cost. As power becomes the defining constraint on scaling AI, Naveen's thesis is that biology-scale eff…
(0:00) Welcome Naveen Rao (4:45) Is energy really the problem? The cost of a token, power contracts & the gap to close (10:24) Cutting out the middleman: abstractions, dynamical systems & a new kind of machine (19:40) Chamath joins: the path to product, porting existing models & building the team Thanks to our partners for making this possible! IREN is a vertically integrated AI Cloud platform, delivering data centers, compute and software for AI training and inference. https://iren.com/ Oracle connects the data, applications, and infrastructure that turn AI into business outcomes—with the…
In this edition of the Metabolic Majlis we dive into Naveen’s remarkable journey from his early days at Duke and Stanford to pioneering ventures in computational neuroscience and AI chip innovation. He unpacks how the brain’s natural efficiency inspires modern tech, why human intuition still trumps pure algorithmic predictions in medicine, and what the future holds for AI agents and causal modeling. Whether you’re a healthcare professional, tech enthusiast, or entrepreneur, this episode delivers real insights without the BS. 01:28 Intro & Episode Overview 02:13 Guest Background & Early Beginn…
The future of AI isn't about whether the model is smart enough. It's about whether we can afford to run it. We dug into the AI cost panic, the energy wall that's coming for compute, and why "developers are disappearing" gets the economics exactly backwards. This week's roundtable: Naveen Rao (CEO of Unconventional AI, building brain-inspired analog chips, formerly sold companies to Intel and Databricks) and Alex Finn (founder of Henry Intelligent Machines and Creator Buddy). Thank you to our exclusive sponsor: PayPal Open, One Platform for All Business: http://paypalopen.com/ Timestamps: 0…
Naveen Rao, founder and CEO of Unconventional AI, argues at AI Ascent 2026 that the 80-year-old digital computer is the wrong substrate for the next era of AI. He walks through the math: the entire human race runs on 160 gigawatts of brainpower, and within a few years the world simply won't have enough electricity to keep scaling AI on conventional hardware. His proposed answer is to rebuild the computer from physics first principles — replacing matrix math with nonlinear dynamics, replacing von Neumann memory access with computation that lives in the time domain, and pushing toward the thermo…
Unconventional AI is building a new computational substrate designed for biology-scale efficiency — running neural networks directly on the nonlinear physics of silicon instead of simulating them through traditional digital abstractions. Recorded at Playground Global in Palo Alto and hosted by Peter Barrett, General Partner, this Sourcery conversation features: Naveen Rao — CEO & Co-Founder, Unconventional AI (founder of Nervana, acquired by Intel for $400M+, and MosaicML, acquired by Databricks for $1.3B; former Chief AI Officer at Databricks) Konstantine Buhler — Partner at Sequoia Capital…
Learn more about Unconventional AI at https://unconv.ai/ Unconventional AI founder Naveen Rao joins Lightspeed partner Guru Chahal to explain why the future of computing is running into an energy wall and why today’s chip architectures aren’t built for the AI era ahead. Naveen breaks down how deep neural networks are rapidly becoming the dominant global workload, why this shift is unprecedented, and why power efficiency is now the defining constraint for compute. Drawing on his background in semiconductors, neuroscience, and AI systems, Naveen explains how Unconventional AI is rethinking com…
Naveen Rao is cofounder and CEO of Unconventional AI, an AI chip startup building analog computing systems designed specifically for intelligence. Previously, Naveen led AI at Databricks and founded two successful companies: Mosaic (cloud computing) and Nervana (AI accelerators, acquired by Intel). In this episode, a16z’s Matt Bornstein sits down with Naveen at NeurIPS to discuss why 80 years of digital computing may be the wrong substrate for AI, how the brain runs on 20 watts while data centers consume 4% of the US energy grid, the physics of causality and what it might mean for AGI, and w…
There are many speculations about the future of artificial intelligence (AI), and in this episode, we hear the opinions and predictions of a player in the inner folds of the AI space. Naveen Rao is the CEO and Co-Founder of the machine learning (ML) training platform, MosaicML, and the former CEO and Co-Founder of Nervana Systems. Naveen shares insight into the thesis behind Mosaic and the practical applications of Large Language Models (LLMs), as well as the Generative Pre-trained Transformer-2 (GPT-2) to GPT-3 transition and the challenge of training models with the constraint of data limits…
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