Blaize Co-Founder & CEO Dinakar Munagala Interview Transcript
Clint Betts
Dinakar, thank you so much for coming on the show. What a pleasure to have you. You are doing some incredible things through Blaize and AI. Tell us about what you're working on. And you are the co-founder and CEO of this company, so tell us how you became that as well.
Dinakar Munagala
Sure. First of all, Clint, it was a pleasure meeting you, and thanks for having me on the show. We at Blaize are a physical world AI company. So when you look at AI, AI is coming in large quantities to the world, and there's the data center part of it, which GPUs and media are creating massive trillion-dollar valuations. And then there's outside the data center, everything to do with the real physical world, right? We're talking about farms, factories, smart cities, education, healthcare, and defense. These are real physical world problems, and AI is coming here to impact them in a positive way. And Blaize is a company that is making foundational technology for the physical world. So, the core of our innovation is a novel chip processor architecture and then software to enable physical-world AI. So, that's what we do at Blaize.
Clint Betts
Tell me what you're thinking about AI. I mean, now the whole world is awake to it.
Dinakar Munagala
Correct.
Clint Betts
Particularly over the past two to three years, it's become the topic to talk about, not just in business and startup, but really in life, as people are concerned that it might take over the world and their jobs and things like that. Give me just your overall take. What are you thinking about the rise of artificial intelligence?
Dinakar Munagala
So AI, if you look at it, the science itself is quite... It's not just come up in the last couple of years, right? It's been around for 30, 40, 50 years. What is making AI more successful in recent times is computing, right? What took probably a massive amount of computing and chips because of Moore's Law and the semiconductor technology getting better and better, you could pack all of that into a tiny chip, right? So that's one key reason why it's gaining momentum. Of course, improved algorithms, and every year and six months, there are new kinds of AI happening and making it very purposeful towards specific use cases. Right? I think that is the other third piece that is making AI very real and practical for our lives. Rather than just saying, "Hey, AI for everything," apply it to a very specific problem and catch potential threats before they happen in a defense or a city application. Apply to number plate recognition for traffic violations, etc. Things that are very specific, I think, are getting real-world deployed.
And so my take, I do think AI is going to be impacting every walk of our life everywhere, pretty much everywhere it's coming, and it is similar to computers, I guess. The whole PC revolution happened. It was not necessarily a bad thing; it was a productivity gain for the whole world. I think AI will see that level of productivity gain. Of course, certain jobs will be eliminated, but the hope is those people will be reskilled to learn newer jobs, just like typewriters, and then become computers; I think pre and post-AI, people will be upskilled to use AI for their workflows. I do see it going that way.
Clint Betts
What advice would you have for other leaders or other CEOs regarding how to think about AI, how to implement it within their company, and then how to implement it within their products, even their product offerings? Because I talked to a lot of CEOs obviously through this, and a lot of them use it internally to help kind of automate workflows and things like that. But many are like, I don't know how to productize this or put it inside my product, which is kind of this interesting... I'm sure that'll come, but what do you think about that? I mean, obviously, your company literally does this. So, how would you give that? What advice would you have for other CEOs?
Dinakar Munagala
So, I guess adopting AI is already happening in almost every company, thanks to Microsoft Copilot, etc. It is integrated into your computer, into your software. So how much you use it, etc, is, of course, case by case. Things which are obvious: if you have a Zoom video call now, there are note-takers, etc.; instead of actually having a meeting scribe, our company actually practices it throughout. At almost every meeting, there's a report generated with action items and so on and so forth. So it is a productivity gain. We are also dabbling with it at other places, like what they call swipe coding or automatic code generation, right? Having AI generate certain code, etc. And the core of our innovation, though, in the chip design part of it thus far, we have not used AI directly, but that's something that's in exploratory stages. We do have to wait for the chip design tools and the ADA companies to adopt it and make it widely available for somebody like us to go and do it.
Coming to advice, I guess I think I can say that the low-hanging fruit for us is cost savings wherever using AI; potentially, you could save costs up to 20 or 30%, depending on the size of your company and the nature of the work. So that's where I see the low-hanging fruit immediately happening. Everything about documentation, etc., etc., all of these is a natural thing. And I think people do need to get... So right now, all of the AI is happening on generic and cloud, so people, of course, don't want to share the data there. That's one of the roadblocks, so there's a way to solve it. Companies are going at it in terms of on-prem clouds, and how you can actually help end, customers keep their data but also use AI. I think as that happens more and more, there'll be more adoption, I think.
Clint Betts
Yeah, yeah, I think that makes sense. I think you're right there. How do you think about, well, first, give me a sense of what a typical day looks like for you as CEO of Blaize?
Dinakar Munagala
So yeah, it's a pretty interesting thing. I mean, I'm just coming off a couple of board meetings followed by a couple of other meetings. But a typical day is more like a; I try to actually divide my week into a day I spend on everything related to revenue and customers. Then, a day related to the product, product tech, and innovation. And a day related to talking to all my team members, my direct reports, etc. And then a day to specifically to everything investors and outbound. So, I try to keep them that way largely. Of course, things do get disturbed if something else comes up; hey, this has to happen on a certain day; we prioritize, but by and large, trying to keep it in such a way so that I do get quality time with all aspects of the business. I would say that's how I approach it.
Clint Betts
How do you think about leadership and motivating your employees in this, and where have you landed on this whole, everybody in the office to work from home to hybrid and all of that type of stuff, and just overall managing a culture?
Dinakar Munagala
Sure. We have always, actually even pre-COVID, the team, we are a global company. We have teams in India, the UK, different parts of the US, and three different places in the US. So we're quite a hybrid company in a way. We do have offices, but we realized that people have to work in different time zones, right? There is a lot of development in India, and the architects are here in the US, so a lot of meetings happen late at night, early morning, and around the clock. So we've been quite hybrid even before. We were actually one of the, I would say, the first customers of Zoom; when Zoom was less than a 10-member company, we adopted Zoom into our workflows. So we've kept it that way; that's why when COVID actually happened, we were efficient; we already knew how things would work, and we were prepared for it.
That said, some of the activity does involve whiteboarding solutions and going into the office and discussing, so that also is there. So we just make it happen, depending on the kind of interaction meeting, what is needed, whether it's a virtual or physical, and then across the border, there's quite a bit of travel within the company, people visiting different sites as needed to solve, let's say technical issues, actual the physical hardware, bringing up boards and so on and so forth. So, it's a mixture of all of that.
Clint Betts
Yeah, yeah, and you've talked a lot about democratizing AI and making it accessible to everyone. What does that look like? What exactly does that mean?
Dinakar Munagala
One of the ways to look at AI is it's a super powerful innovation, and it can impact everybody, every business, every person. So by making the tools and the computing power and the technology so easy to use and deploy that somebody who's not a data scientist can actually deploy AI, I think that is how simplified it should become. Just like your personal computing history, right?
So imagine a doctor who, and this is a real example at Blaize, a doctor in Southeast Asia, was looking at retina images, and it's hard to actually identify a certain kind of cancerous cells. Applying AI tools and our AI Studio, we've developed a code-free platform called Studio. So we have our chips, and we have our software. The software is intended to improve the lives of people and different practitioners to adopt AI. So, using our software tools, he could actually identify these cells automatically using computer vision AI. So this is actually pretty transformational, right? Somebody who's not even from an AI background was able to build a solution and deploy it. So, that, to me, is a very powerful and democratized version of AI.
I think countries, I forget which one, was it Norway or somewhere? They have this concept of a citizen data scientist, meaning that anybody who's doing any walk of life should be able to build an AI solution. And that's underway, right? Initially, it started in all the deep data centers, Google, Facebook, etc, where they have all the expertise. But if you look outside the data center in the physical world, there's a genuine massive opportunity for AI, but also a knowledge gap. So a company that gets it right and addresses the hardware plus software, an act of actually making AI easily deployable, is onto something huge. And that's where we are focused, to having the ideal mix of hardware and software, making it like a Macintosh experience so that you can deploy solutions.
Clint Betts
We've talked a lot about the upsides of AI. What are some of the downsides you see?
Dinakar Munagala
As with any technology, any new technology, there's bound to be controversy, and there's bound to be potentially the risk of being utilized negatively. Imagine a world where AI algorithms are being used to mimic these spam callers, etc, and try to get people's information, etc, for all bad kinds of things. Those are some of the things that are happening. They could also be national security-related items. They do say that new generation battles will not be physical fights but more cyber-based and complex AI algorithms-based. So, all kinds of those things are the negative ramifications of any technology. But then again, what we look at, hey, does the good outweigh the bad? And that's what I keep thinking about as we build our technology, and we just try to focus on the good.
Clint Betts
Yeah, and focusing on the good, I imagine, can be exhilarating in thinking about all of the various things that it can do. What do you read, and what reading recommendations would you have for us?
Dinakar Munagala
Nowadays, a lot of my reading happens on short things like articles written on LinkedIn and Medium and so on and so forth. My wife also tells me about these AI-abridged kind of books. An entire book gets summarized into 15 minutes or 10 minutes while you're on the treadmill. I've yet to take to that, but yeah, I think some of those podcasts, etc, are actually quite, quite helpful. You get what the person is saying, the emotion of it, more so by hearing it, so some of those are interesting. It's just a mixed bag, and of course, reading one of my, I like the MIT Tech Review, that's really interesting. They talk about new trends, etc, and a mixture of different articles and here and there, I guess.
Clint Betts
How are you feeling about this year? We've had a kind of economic, maybe, I don't know if turmoil is the right word, but just kind of confusion, let's say, with tariffs and things of that nature. And it does seem like maybe things might be calming down. How are you thinking about the rest of the year from an economic perspective?
Dinakar Munagala
We, of course, are paying very close attention to everything that's happening because our customers are global, and our supply chain is also global. Our chips are manufactured here on US soil, and then so we pay very close attention to everything that's going on. We have an outside law firm, an inside council, and everybody advising us on the ramifications. We are in constant touch with our customers because as we supply, if there are ramifications in terms of tariffs, etc., how do we make sure the customer gets their product on time and within what they expected and so on? So, it's basically paying close attention and being nimble enough to act.
Clint Betts
We think a lot about CEO.com; the chances one gives are just as important as the chances one takes. When you hear that, who gave you a chance to get you to where you are today?
Dinakar Munagala
I would say early on, some of the investors and a mentor figure who backed me. My godparents, who backed me. There's a mentor figure who was a chip guru investor; he backed us right when we were in garage mode, and then the rest is history. So we've definitely been beneficiaries, and along the way, the automotive company, DENSO, tested our technology, and then they invested. And so we've definitely been beneficiaries of people rooting for us, and I immensely value all of the support over the years that we've received. Even today, I talk to my first investors and, of course, quite often, and I am so thankful to all of them that they helped us get here.
Clint Betts
That's incredible. Dinakar, thank you so much for coming on. What an honor to have you. Congratulations on everything you've done. I mean, Blaize has had $330 million in funding, and you were recognized as the Innovator of the Year locally there in Sacramento. I mean, it's just unbelievable what you're doing, and we kind of scratched the surface here. I hope you'll come back and we'll talk more. But thank you so much for coming on; really appreciate it.
Dinakar Munagala
Thank you, Clint.
Clint Betts
Thanks so much.
Edited for readability.