> I think the model they chose is out of date and hard to sell

I understood it as a proof-of-concept, not a for-mass-production single blueprint - i.e.: "if you need your NN in a CIM form on ASIC, we can do it".

Their next proof-of-concept was said to be meant to be about size: "we showed you we can do it with 8b, now we are working to show you we can do 24b or 32b". Then, "and we plan to go bigger and faster".

> Our second model, still based on Taalas’ first-generation silicon platform (HC1), will be a mid-sized reasoning LLM. It is expected in our labs this spring and will be integrated into our inference service shortly thereafter. // Following this, a frontier LLM will be fabricated using our second-generation silicon platform (HC2). HC2 offers considerably higher density and even faster execution. Deployment is planned for winter (19 Feb 2006)