Keen to get thoughts from people who have been watching the company closer than I have.
Pattern recognition vs pattern learning.
Surely the market appetite for energy efficient pattern recognition (e.g: NaNose) is far broader than that of edge AI?
AI is a broad term and is frequently used and abused by companies trying to appear at the forefront, just as 'cloud computing' was. When I hear references to AI its hard to know WHAT type of AI is being referred to here. Deep learning? unsupervised learning?
Is there really a huge market appetite for products whose findings could essentially be inconsistent?
Surely any device maker will want to provide the pattern recognition than roll the dice and hope the chip finds it's own?
Is there something I'm missing here? The potential for low cost pattern recognition is huge. Edge AI currently, seems small. Is it worth Brainchip conflating both?
Hardware/Software
From the latest podcast, Anil mentioned Brainchip being a hardware company (via their IP). (unless i totally misheard him, it's hard to hear/understand what he was saying)
If this is the case, what role do the current software developers have at BrainChip Inc, are they still testing Akida?
are they still trying to find use cases for their product?
Is it to assist those with evaluation boards in the event they do not know how to work with tensorflow?
Speaking of evaluation boards... How many are out there and how many are 'available' for those wanting to test the hardware?
NaNose seemed to have been tested via collecting the sensor data and then sending it off to Brainchip.
If this is the case, surely testing should be broadly available to anyone interested without constraint?
Are there many instances of people doing their evaluations this way without the physical boards?
The role of Renesas.
As licencees to the IP, is BrainChip relying upon Renesas to be the mechanism for sales?
e.g: a device maker contacts Renenas for processors, is there an expectation that Renanas suggest Brainchip as a solution (above that of their other processors who may have been contractual terms with Renesas?)
Was this an exclusive licence? Is there any information about the terms of the licence?
Do Renesas manufacturer the chips? or are they relying on existing foundries (who all seemed to be at capacity and backlogged) ?
If Renenas don't manufacturer the chips, what is their role in the supply chain?
(20min delay)