Flapping Airplanes raises $1 billion after rebuilding its chip software

FULL INTERVIEW: Flapping Airplanes just raised a $1B Series A after rebuilding the GPU stack from scratch. Co-founder Aidan Smith says they don’t even use Torch, NCCL or CUDA’s normal runtime. One kernel on one B200 can now train a model, serve inference and play Doom at the same time. @aidanmantine, Thiel Fellow and 3-year Neuralink alum, co-founded @flappyairplanes. He joined @sophiadew and @theojaffee to break down why AI needs to learn more like the brain, how they rebuilt the GPU stack, and who they hire: 00:30 where the name Flapping Airplanes comes from 02:04 why they bet on data efficiency 03:07 what Neuralink taught him about AI 04:27 how slow your brain actually is 06:06 why not just emulate the whole brain 08:40 why they rebuilt the GPU stack from scratch 10:33 compute…

Flapping Airplanes co-founder @aidanmantine explains why your brain’s slow wiring is a clue to making AI much smarter: "How slow do you think it is to go from one side of the brain to the other? It takes 150 milliseconds. In a GPU you’re talking about microseconds. It’s not even close." "In order to even get that latency, your brain has to pull some unbelievable bullshit. And it’s tapping out at 150 milliseconds. That’s so slow that you would not be able to watch this video if it was streamed at that frequency." "Everything fits to the hardware that it’s given. Everything is downstream of the primitives that you give it. By unlocking the GPU primitives, we can make models that are much smarter than today’s." @flappyairplanes

Flapping Airplanes co-founder @aidanmantine reveals how he attracts top AI talent by trying to talk candidates out of joining his own lab: "When people interview with us, we counter sell them a ton. If they wanna go work at OpenAI or Anthropic, they should go do that. You should go to Flapping Airplanes if you wanna be part of the last age in human history where you can do research." "It's really easy to go into a big org and hide under the floorboards. At Flapping Airplanes, you own this thing that's really important. This project will live or die on your success." "We've had some people inbound us who are very radically different, like a Clash of Clans world champion, who you interview and you're like, holy crap, this guy is really smart." "We have lots of IMO medalists, but also lots…

Flapping Airplanes co-founder @aidanmantine explains why OpenAI or Anthropic reaching superintelligence first wouldn't mean the end of AI research: "What we’re a bet on is that the age of research is not dead." "Coding is this very narrow domain where it’s easy to verify what’s going on, and you can just scale the thing. Basically, no one I know programs anymore. Myself included." "Models are still not that great at creating new research ideas. The fact that data labeler is a job, and a growing job even, indicates that there’s something wrong." @flappyairplanes