The specs look impressive. It is always good to have competition.
They announced tapeout in October with planned dev boards next year. Vaporware is when things don’t appear, not when they are on their way (it takes some time for hardware).
It’s also strategically important for Europe to have its own supply. The current and last US administration have both threatened to limit supply of AI chips to European countries, and China would do the same (as they have shown with Nexperia).
And of course you need the software stack with it. They will have thought of that.
These kinds of things-- cheaper-than-NVIDIA cards that can produce a lot of tokens or run large models cheaply are absolutely necessary to scale text models economically.
Without things like these-- those Euclyd things, those Groq things, etc. no one will be able to offer up big models at prices where people will actually use them, so lack of things like this actually cripples training of big models too.
If the price/token graph is right, this would mean 2.5x more tokens, which presumably means actually using multiple prompts to refine something before producing the output, or to otherwise produce really long non-output sequences during the preparation the output. This also fits really well with the Chinese progress in LLM RL for maths. I suspect all that stuff is totally general and can be applied to non-maths things too.
The negativity doesn’t make much sense. The specs are strong, and the chip already taped out in October that’s a concrete milestone, not vaporware. Hardware of this class always takes months between tape-out and dev boards.
Official announcement: https://vsora.com/vsora-announces-tape-out-of-game-changing-...
Strategically, having a European AI inference chip matters. The US has already threatened export limits to Europe, and China has shown similar behavior (e.g., Nexperia). Building local supply is important.
Calling this vaporware makes no sense: tape-out + published roadmap = real, not slides.
> Calling this vaporware makes no sense: tape-out + published roadmap = real, not slides.
I agree that the comments here are surprisingly superficial in their complaints, but I guess it the typical bike-shedding, people don't have technical points to nitpick or the experience to judge the actual product, so from their US-based point of view, they find something else to hook on to, even when there are facts like concrete partnerships making it clear it isn't vaporware, they just have to say something.
If the company is working in isolation (this company is not), the company is continuously pushing back on time frames (they haven't, at least yet), the company never enter actual fabrication/production (which they just did) or if the company never release any details what so ever (they have), then it looks more like vaporware than just "It'll be coming soon".
If those things are true in ~6 months, then I'll join the crowd here who are overly pessimistic at this moment, but until then, as most of the time, I'll give them benefit of the doubt.
I don't believe labeling healthy skepticism and criticism as negativity to farm artificial sympathy in retaliation, does any good to anyone.
Humans have pattern recognition capabilities for a reason, and if a company is triggering that in them, then it's best expressed why(probably because they saw this MO before and got burned) instead of just cheerleading the unknown for fake positivity.
6th comment: "They haven't disclosed any release date, Lots of chip startups start as this kind of vaporware" (they did literally just enter fabrication it seems)
10th comment: "So far, they just talk about it."
Maybe it looks differently now, after 14 hours since the submission was made, but initially yesterday, most of the comments were unfounded (and poorly researched) criticism.
If it was submitted 14 hours ago that is start of night in Europe (the target market). So the 9-5 target market was mostly asleep, while USA was getting home from work. China was getting awake. If the article was submitted 5-6 hours earlier or 7-8 hours later, the outcome would've differed.
Since it seems like a French company, I can think of various European customers who would be interested in using their hardware, or even investing in this company. For starters, government, defense industry, IT (including infosec). European defense industry is a goldmine right now, the sky is the limit.
>European defense industry is a goldmine right now, the sky is the limit.
Care to detail? Like I'm sure defense stocks and some arms manufacturing is up, but where I live I don't see the tech jobs market being boosted by defense spending.
It all goes slowww. But it is moving forward. You would need a tough screening regardless. Defense is very picky about their contractors. But I can give a hint where the money comes from: 3,5% of BBP has to be for defense, and 1,5% for infra for defense. Many countries were at about 2% before (getting a bit higher due to geopolitical changes early 2022).
Also, think of funding for European tech companies. Governments are getting rid of Microsoft 365 in favor of Nextcloud. Especially Opencloud (Nextcloud, also European, formerly known as nextcloud-go) and Opendesk. It goes slow, partly because of regulations and each country goes for their own local contractor (an expert who speaks the native language).
The victim is going to be our health care system, and general social security system. Because we were able to afford this thanks to NATO, and NATO is now a paper tiger.
Desire to invest in USA has gone down because of Trump, and that money will partly flow to China, partly internal. On the short term, USA has incredible soft power over EU. But on the long term, not so much anymore.
If a company says on their website "We'll have hardware ready this Q1 2026" and a commentator says "They haven't given any timelines anywhere, so most likely vaporware", then I'd consider that unfounded negativity, mostly because it was so trivial to see if that was true or not, probably took me about 2 minutes.
The specs look impressive. It is always good to have competition.
They announced tapeout in October with planned dev boards next year. Vaporware is when things don’t appear, not when they are on their way (it takes some time for hardware).
It’s also strategically important for Europe to have its own supply. The current and last US administration have both threatened to limit supply of AI chips to European countries, and China would do the same (as they have shown with Nexperia).
And of course you need the software stack with it. They will have thought of that.
https://vsora.com/vsora-announces-tape-out-of-game-changing-...