femtoAI opens its developer community and SPU chip kit to all developers

What developers get

According to femtoAI, a full-stack AI silicon and compression company, the community is now open to developers after what it called a successful beta program. Access is available through developer.femto.ai.

The company lists the following key features of the community:

• SPU Evaluation Kit: developers can order their own kit to access the SPU chip.
• Self-service development: access to the full suite of femtoAI tools, compilers and models.
• Model flexibility: developers can bring their own model, use one of femtoAI's prebuilt models, or develop from scratch, with agent-friendly documentation available.
• Sparsity Studio: a measurement tool that shows the actual power and memory savings unlocked by femtoAI sparsity.
• Community Forum: open discussion and Q&A with femtoAI experts and developers.

femtoAI says its technology turns patented neural-network sparsity and advanced model compression into real savings, with a 10X lower power draw and 10X smaller memory footprint. These figures are the company's own claims.

Beta customers and compression work

Bill Hoppin, Chief Business Officer at femtoAI, said the company had been working in the community with dozens of enterprises as they build new products on its platform. "The time to open this experience to more enterprises and developers is now," he said. He named Legato and Marshall as customers that gained a competitive advantage using the developer tools and systems.

The platform has been used in femtoAI's audio and sensing business. According to the company, Legato, which it describes as a smart glasses company, Marshall, a headphone and earbud brand, and NewSound have used the technology to build AI-enhanced audio solutions with 10X less memory and 10X less power.

Sangnam Choi, VP of Audio & Sensing at femtoAI, said the company applies advanced model compression techniques that have let it deliver open-source models such as OpenAI Whisper at 10X less memory, as well as custom solutions like local voice commands. He said the team continues to implement emerging techniques to reach an even lower power and memory footprint.

Mehul Trivedi, CEO at Legato Hearing, said integrating AI audio on the femtoAI platform helped achieve a level of hearing performance for Legato Frames "that was previously impossible in the form factor on a remarkable timeline."

Event and company background

femtoAI will host a developer happy hour during SF Tech Week on Wednesday, October 7, at Barebottle Brewing Company's beer garden at Salesforce Park. The company says attendees can get an exclusive walk-through of the developer community from femtoAI experts.

femtoAI was founded in 2018 by researchers from the Brains in Silicon Lab at Stanford University and is headquartered in Silicon Valley. It says its platform targets devices ranging from wearables and household appliances to smart glasses and robotics.

What it means for developers

The move widens access to a hardware and software stack that, until now, was used by a limited group of enterprises. Developers working on devices where power and memory are tight can order the evaluation kit, test their own or prebuilt models, and use Sparsity Studio to measure the savings themselves rather than relying on the company's figures. The source does not give pricing for the kit or details on availability beyond ordering through the developer site.