Etched @ Harvard
Prod is incredibly excited to welcome the Etched team back to Harvard!
Since dropping out 2 years ago, Gavin, Chris, and Robert have built one of the most impressive startups in the AI hardware space. Etched has raised hundreds of millions from leading investors, including Peter Thiel, Jane Street, and Two Sigma, all betting that Etched will unlock the AI inference singularity.
Etched is building Sohu, an AI inference chip that's >10x faster than NVIDIA GPUs. Sohu is hyper-specialized for running transformers: the architecture that powers all frontier AI models today (from OpenAI to xAI, Meta, Deepseek, etc.). By specializing, Sohu offers disruptively better throughput, latency, and cost per token. Sohu makes new AI products like real-time video and swarms of deep research agents deployable at humanity-scale.
Now 150-people strong, the team has attracted some of the top engineers, AI researchers, PhDs, quants, and industry legends, like Brian Loiler (who built HGX/DGX, >80% of NVIDIA’s revenue) and David Munday (who built Google’s TPU v1-v5 software and firmware stack).
Speakers will include four Harvard alums/dropouts:
Robert Wachen: Co-Founder & COO of Etched; previously co-founded Prod ($15B cohort valuation) - Harvard ‘24 / Thiel Fellow
Henry Bosch: Math 55 alum and Stanford Math PhD dropout - Harvard ‘22
Michael Fein: Prev. ran Citadel’s GenAI strategy, ex-Blackstone - Harvard ‘22
Carter Wilcox: Prev. Noam Shazeer’s Chief of Staff, first business hire Character.AI - Harvard ‘20
Undergrads, grad/PhD students, and researchers are all welcome to join for the agenda below. Please RSVP as space (and Mike's Pastries 🍪🧁) are limited.
Note: For those interested, Etched will also be giving an advanced-level tech talk at MIT on May 4th that focuses on chip bottlenecks, matrix sharding algorithms, and approximation theory (etched.com/mit)