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The AI inference sector could be getting its own version of the long-running rivalry between OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SpaceX’s Elon Musk after AI hardware and software startup tiny corp publicly questioned the credibility of the benchmarks behind the chip that inference rival Etched shipped to Jane Street on August 18.
While Musk and Altman have publicly swung mud at each other, the accusations appear to have moved in only one direction in this inference drama between the operator of the tinygrad framework and the firm that raised $700 million at a roughly $21 billion valuation, as reported by Cryptopolitan.
tiny corp: “Etched shipped a slogan”
tiny corp framed its latest criticism of Etched as a warning to buyers and investors, writing on X that it could not rule out that the firm led by CEO Gavin Uberti did not have a working chip or was simply propping up a poor one with “smoke and mirrors.”
The tinygrad X account also conceded that “It’s possible they have a great chip and just very distasteful marketing.”
tiny corp is asking Etched to put up the numbers to back its claim. Peak FLOPS, power draw, or third-party benchmarks that don’t reveal any proprietary tech would do, according to a follow-up tinygrad post.
tinygrad fanned the conspiracy flame by saying the company could be trying to avoid making outright fraudulent claims by not touting any numbers above its unflattering figures.
The tiny corp criticism goes as far back as June 2025, when the same account urged people to alert Etched investors of what it claims was a nonsense pitch claiming “20x gains from etching transformers into silicon.”
A different critic, Wesley Yue, a robotics engineer who claimed to have held roles at Kitty Hawk and Waymo, wrote on X: “This smells very bad. none of the claims make sense,” in a July 2026 scrutiny of Etched’s technical claims.
Yue questioned how much of an achievement it was to hit a high model FLOPs utilization number when peak throughput is low. He added that spending scarce bleeding-edge wafers on lower-performance chips does not add up.
“Etched shipped a slogan,” was the tiny corp’s conclusion.
Etched has quadrupled its valuation in eight months
As Cryptopolitan reported, citing the Wall Street Journal, Etched got $700 million in fresh backing via a Jane Street-led round. The funding came at a valuation that roughly doubled the firm’s $10.3 billion rating in a Series C round that closed just one month earlier in July. The firm was valued at $5 billion in December 2025.
Jane Street, unlike the tiny corp, was impressed by the hardware that Etched delivered, according to the funding announcement. “We tested the chip and are pleased with the early results,” the firm said.
Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel, Bain Capital Ventures, SK Hynix, and Blackstone have now participated in Etched funding rounds.
Per Cryptopolitan, Etched reported first-pass silicon success on TSMC’s N4P process, employs more than 400 people, and has booked over $1 billion in orders. It runs a 2-megawatt site in San Jose and has opened a 10-megawatt facility in Milpitas. The company has also worked to shed its early reputation for etching a single model into each chip; its systems now run any frontier model, including DeepSeek, Qwen, Mamba, and Llama.
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