Bitmain’s Zhan Ketuan believes that AI software and hardware integration is not the right direction

At the Fuzhou City Brain and Northeast Fujian Informationization Strategic Cooperation Conference held today, Zhan Ketuan, chairman of Beijing Bitmain Technology Co., Ltd., said in an exclusive interview with Jiwei.com reporters that software and hardware integration is not the right direction for AI, and it is only suitable for some very certain application scenarios. For the edge side, software and hardware integration has low cost and high efficiency, but it needs to support multiple algorithms in the cloud, so it is necessary to create an open algorithm ecosystem, which is not suitable for software and hardware integration.

Zhan Ketuan also believes that AI has now gone through the storytelling stage, and the main theme is the real implementation. Bitmain is a company that has truly gained experience in the market. All IPs are independently developed, and independence must be the core competitiveness. At present, Bitmain's cloud chip has been iterated to the third generation, and the second generation chip has been successfully promoted in the market. He also pointed out that although the third generation of AI chips has been released, it is expected to be launched in the first half of next year because a lot of system development and customer integration work still needs to be done.

Talking about the progress of AI chips, Zhan Ketuan said that the business models of terminal and cloud AI chips are different. The cloud focuses on performance, while the terminal emphasizes cost, making it difficult to implement. Bitmain has established an independent company to operate at the terminal AI level.

Regarding the speed of iteration, Zhan Ketuan said that it was a bit radical in the past. Mining chips were upgraded every 6 months, and it was assumed that AI chips could be upgraded every 9 months. However, AI chips are complex and there are huge challenges. From the cloud perspective, Intel's server chips are basically upgraded every two years. Currently, Bitmain uses mature processes to iterate relatively quickly, and there is still broad room for development in the future. Bitmain expects its AI chip revenue to exceed billions of dollars in the future