ModelCat AI, formerly the low-power chip pioneer Eta Compute, builds an agentic, hardware-aware platform that automatically designs, trains, optimizes and validates machine-learning models for embedded, edge and IoT devices. Its patented AI-in-the-Loop workflow, backed by a physical hardware farm that calibrates results against real silicon, compresses a model-development cycle that once took 12 to 24 months down to a matter of days. The Sunnyvale company works with chipmakers including NXP and Alif Semiconductor to hand developers ready-to-run models tuned to the exact constraints of the hardware they will run on.

Tim Dettmers is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University and Research Scientist at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2), best known for making large language models accessible on consumer hardware. He created the bitsandbytes library (2.2M monthly installs), co-authored QLoRA - a technique enabling fine-tuning of 65B-parameter models on a single GPU - and pioneered LLM.int8() quantization. With over 18,000 citations across his work, Dettmers has become one of the most influential voices in efficient deep learning, consistently arguing that computational democratization - not AGI hype - is where the real progress lives.