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Introducing our first model, Un-0!
We trained an image generator powered by a backbone of coupled oscillators in place of a more traditional conventional neural network.
GIF
Unconventional AI
34 posts
Unconventional AI
@unconvAI
Unconventional AI is rethinking the foundations of a computer to bring biology-scale efficiency to artificial intelligence.
Joined October 2025
- Replying to @unconvAIIs the physics actually doing the work? Yes. Our ablations show that the trained dynamics provide value over a decoder only baseline and a random Kuramoto feature reservoir, and that increasing the number of integration steps increases model quality.
We’re at the beginning of the unconventional AI journey, but we are releasing artifacts to the community to enable us all to build together. We’ve open-sourced the Un-0 weights, training scripts, and ablation code. If you build physics-based models, plug them into our scaffold
- Most companies use AI tools, but we are not a 'conventional company.' We're building Unconventional AI for this new age as an AI-native organization. In this latest blog, our [un]CFO, Ali Esfahani, shares how he has used AI in his first five months across finance, research,
GIF - Lewis Hamilton recently pointed to a mismatch between simulation and reality as a major factor behind a challenging race weekend. It's a problem every systems engineer recognizes: how do you simulate a system operating at the edge of chaos? In our latest blog, we explore how
GIF - Most real-world systems are dynamic. So why do we still treat computation as static? Our latest blog explores computation through motion using gyroscopes, rods, springs, and ordinary differential equations to perform handwritten digit classification. A deep dive into: •
GIF - Tomorrow, May 15, is the final day to submit pre-proposals for the Unconventional Grant. Over the past several weeks, we’ve seen proposals spanning: • computation as dynamics • in-memory and in-physics compute • architectures that minimize data movement • new
- Getting to 1000x energy efficiency in AI isn’t about one breakthrough. It’s about solving two hard constraints: 1. Data movement dominates energy 2. Amdahl’s Law caps system-level gains Which means you have to rethink everything: models, hardware, and how they’re designed
- We are proud to announce that Unconventional AI has been named on the 2026 @CBinsights AI 100 list. Find us here: cbinsights.com/learn/ai-100-t…
- Attending #ODSCAIEast today? Join our cofounder @mcarbin at 2:35 PM ET in the Keynote Room. “Nonlinear Dynamics as the Next Substrate for Intelligence” explores a fundamental idea: we may be building AI on the wrong substrate. The human brain runs on ~20 watts. Today’s AI
- Analog vs. digital. Which is actually better? As AI systems hit efficiency limits, it might be time to rethink the abstractions we’ve taken for granted and focus on using the right tool for the job. Explore the case for a mixed-signal future in our latest blog post “Analog is
- We’re hiring people who are endlessly curious, comfortable with discomfort, and drawn to the edge of chaos. If this sounds like you, apply here:At @unconvAI we have all the conventional benefits. But we also have unconventional ones: Edge of Chaos Stipend: We provide $1,000 annually to encourage unconventional risk-taking. Use it to fund a project or experience that takes you entirely out of your comfort zone. This can
- We’re introducing the Unconventional Grant. A new research grant program supporting bold, unconventional ideas in AI. We’re allocating $500,000 in total funding, awarding up to five $100,000 grants to researchers exploring new paradigms in efficient, scalable, and biologically
- Stop copying the past. Is modern AI just a "cargo cult" worshipping the GPU? For 60 years, hardware and software have lived in completely separate worlds. But AI is forcing us to tear down those walls. The industry is stuck optimizing old abstractions and linear algebra not
