Short answer: Mitesh Agrawal says Positron is one of the first accelerators integrated with Arm's own CPU. He says Intel raised CPU prices twice in six months, 10 to 15% each time, and still sells out as agentic workflows grow.
Watch this answer from Episode 37 (starts at 23:53) · Episode 37 notes and transcript
From Episode 37: Why AI Inference Is So Expensive (And How Positron Is Solving It), starting at 23:53.
Sam Nadler [23:52]: Yeah. I just you know, I think we've talked about it, but the CPU was left for dead. Now AI is is bringing it back. Kinda talked about this significantly, but, you need I think you guys both had a chance to read the article. Any high level thoughts here?
Mitesh Agrawal [24:08]: Well, Positron is part of this article or part of this story. Right? Positron?
Jordan Metzner [24:11]: Exactly.
Mitesh Agrawal [24:12]: And it was announced as a major partner for the ARM CPU. Actually, we're one of the first accelerators ever to get integrated with the ARM CPU, which is their first their own physical product. Like, people sometimes are placed that, hey, this is ARM's first physical product. No. ARM has worked on, with Nvidia for Grace CPUs, and with Amazon for Graviton CPUs. Like, a lot of these hyperscaler CPUs have ARM IP underneath it, but it's ARM's first, their own CPU product really competing versus Intel and AMD. So Positron is a big part of it, so we're very proud of that and obviously are gonna, work with the ecosystem there, but we think that it's a great move by ARM as market, the market has really rewarded them. But the interesting thing I will say here is that title is absolutely correct. Intel has raised their prices on CPU two times over in the last six months. Intel, with the CPUs which haven't really like you know, they haven't come with a like a big refresh of CPU cycle or anything like that.
Mitesh Agrawal [25:14]: They just raise prices because the demand is so massive, you know. They raise prices each time by 10 to 15%, and they're still fully selling out. So much so that I saw some rumors around Intel buying out there and owning and buying out their own fab fully in terms of ownership percentages and things like those because they're just seeing that, oh, great. We have been left behind in the advanced packaging node labs. That's okay. CPUs are now fully getting sold out, so our business is back in booming kind of mechanism. Same thing with AMD. AMD is great. AMD has GPU, CPUs, it's gonna be really phenomenal for that company honestly when I see that. So and then as agentic workflows really really expand, there's many kind of rule of thumbs people say, it's like one agent, one CPU, one person, one CPU. It really does depend. You can separate out one CPU into multiple vCPUs, and if agents are not powerful enough, you can have one agent per one vCPU or something like that. Right? So there's many ways to cut that kind of thing, but it really is true that each of us just like in our phones, when apps first started and came out, we, what, had like 10 apps, 20 apps per each user in our phones. Now I doubt you can count how many apps you have in your phone.
Mitesh Agrawal [26:28]: Like I doubt you can even count it. Right? It's the same thing that's gonna happen on agentic workflows. It's like, we have like each right now five, ten, 15, even the best kind of software programmers that are using it probably have tens or hundreds of AI agents today. It's gonna evolve into like thousands of AI agents across different types of applications and, yeah, like, that that CPU world is back in business fully.
Sam Nadler [26:50]: Amazing. Well, great episode. Thank you so much, Mitesh. Mitesh, where can people find you on X, on LinkedIn? Where what's the best way to get in touch?
Mitesh Agrawal [27:01]: Yeah. I mean, I'm say I'm I'm on both of them. I am generally a lurker. I post randomly, but you know, but on x it's like Mitesh seven one. I think that's my handle, but I think if you just search Mitesh and Positron AI, it'll come up. On LinkedIn it's obviously, just search my name Mitesh Agrawal. I think my tag is Mitesh seven or something like that. So they should be able to find me on both. I, as I said, generally I'm posting around Positron stuff, around what I think are important trends, but there are better and more intelligent people than me. So I'm right now, I'm really focused on just building and growing out the company, growing out revenue. That's one of the key things for Positron AI. I think, one of we are one of the few early stage AI silicon companies that have achieved, tens of millions of dollars of revenue going into hopefully hundreds of millions early in the next twelve months or so. So that's kind of really critical for us from that perspective. And then, Sam, I have one request. I don't know if the simulation that you did is public or is accessible to outside of your own network, but if it is, I'd love to take it first leg, play with it, and then obviously showcase into our internal demo as well.
Sam Nadler [28:13]: I'm happy to share. Yeah. It's not. It's private, but I'm happy to share it for you. And, Jordan, any final thoughts?
Jordan Metzner [28:20]: No. This was awesome. Obviously, having a hardware founder here was pretty cool, obviously, to talk about a different aspect of AI than, kind of how you and I talk about it, Sam, which is more kind of end consumer on a day to day basis, and vibe coding and things like that. But it just shows like how vast this industry is, how early it is, and kind of how big the upside is as, obviously, as I think Mitesh says, like, you see Nvidia in the news, but, just like one small piece or just one piece of kind of this entire ecosystem. So, anyway, super exciting, Mitesh. Really looking forward to some more developments from Positron, and thanks for joining us today.
Mitesh Agrawal [28:56]: My pleasure. Thanks for having me, guys. I really appreciate you.
Jordan Metzner [28:58]: Bye, guys.
