Patel estimates SMIC yield by analyzing tool orders since companies don't publicly disclose China sales.
“And you have to do a lot of napkin math to figure this out because no one publicly releases how many tools SMIC is buying from them.”
Patel says InferenceMax runs daily benchmarks to track hardware performance improvements as software optimizes.
“And why this is important is you can see the progress of hardware over time as the software stack gets more optimized.”
“We try and track the entire supply chain from tools that manufacture chips, fabs, data centers, energy, industrials, and then AI models and who's using them, how much, and where.”
Forecasting the future gap between open and closed AI models requires measuring historical performance differences.
“To project how the open vs closed capability gap will progress in the future, we first need to measure the past.”