I liked the complete honesty today. (As far as they can be)
There is recognition, at last, that the company was rudderless in terms of commercialisation previously. I think if you have been invested a long time and don't have rose tinted glasses that was obvious.
I am convinced by Antonio, I am not entirely convinced by Sean. He seems much more comfortable talking about the technology and ecosystems but the rest of the CEO's role, not so much.
Both Antonio and Sean clearly expressed their frustration at the current state of affairs. Both must have had their eyes opened leading upto last years AGM, but could not say it. It is also clear that whilst Akida 1.0 is good, we had not really engaged with prospective customers to see if that is what they wanted - hence another 6-9 month delay to a major uptake of the technology. Having said that, without Akida 1.0 we would not have known what we now know, so a small silver lining.
My thoughts are that if Megachips was in on the back end design, then they have customers who want the technology as designed, so once testing is complete, we may see some adoption from their customers, BUT, we wont know about it until revenue comes in.
The good news is that portability and scalability has been proven, so hopefully the timeline of 2 - 4 years to adopt the technology is now reduced and we should see more IP licences in the next 12 - 24 months.
I would love to hear our Director of Sales speak about the technology and what he is finding in the market place - it is his job to close the deal so to speak.
Overall, the company is a hold for me, for another 18 months, but with the expectation of more positive momentum, which will include more partnerships and some IP licences, with significant revenue to follow.
Clearly just my opinion. You should form your own.
Hi Dr,
I'm think your comment that the company had not sufficiently engaged with customers can be viewed in the light that the Akda "engineering" version was distributed to EAPs and the design modified in response to feedback. As Sean said, Akida 1 had a limited field of application.
Akida 1 was produced starting in late 2021.
There was talk of LSTM, but then transformers, which only emerged in 2020, became more widely known after the commercial chip production. I haven't got a full understanding of transformers, but f\From what little I've been able to glean, I believe transformers are simpler and more efficient than LSTM. I don't know the details of Akida 2, but I understand that it is capable of performing time-based functions (speed, direction, speech, ...) on-chip, relieving the CPU of these tasks, hence further expediting the process.
And development is ongoing - we continue to work with customers to develop silicon which improves their products in a meaningful way.
So, from the meeting, we learned that in the real world Akida 1 was found to have a limited scope of application but is being incorporated in chips (Renesas, MegaChips), and, from the real world, we learned that the technological environment is not treading water, skipping from LSTMs to transformers in the blink of an eye.
The remarkable thing is that BrainChip has the agility to switch from Akida 1 to LSTM to transformer in such a short time.
This is a much harder journey then most of us, shareholders and company alike, anticipated, exacerbated by the global economic conditions and other factors.
There are major barriers to entry for the customers of IP licensing - licence fee and cost of designing and manufacturing chips. This excludes most smaller potential customers. They will need to obtain chips from MegaChips.
Otherwise we could monetize our model libraries, and possibly licence our Akida simulation software for commercial use.
