FF
(…) Prophesee was partnered with Sony, Qualcomm, Intel & SynSense
when it engaged in this interview:
https://brainchip.com/episode-20-br...ed-vision-systems-with-prophesees-luca-verre/
Brainchip has licensed IP to MegaChips who produce SoC for Sony.
Brainchip and Prophesee have partnered in circumstances where despite Prophesee being partnered with Sony, Qualcomm, Intel and SynSense they stated that until they found Brainchip AKIDA they worried they may be building a house of straw.
This touching little story that FF has been telling for years doesn’t get truer the more he repeats it.
Luca Verre never said that.
Neither did he mention that until Prophesee found Akida, they were “worried”, nor that they were worried they may be building a “house of straw” - reminiscent of the classic English fairy tale
The Three Little Pigs. There was never any Big Bad Wolf threatening to huff and puff and blow the house in.
FF simply misheard what Prophesee’s Co-Founder and CEO had actually said in the 5 October 2022 This Is Our Mission podcast with Rob Telson, which was: “
Our technology [sic] are very complementary. From the very beginning, when we started Prophesee with Christoph [Posch], we knew that we were actually building half the story, in fact”.
While Luca Verre’s Italian-accented English may be a little difficult to understand for some people, the context is pretty clear, as he goes on to explain what he meant by saying that, and he also picks up the second half of the story later: “
So now combining our human-inspired sensor with BrainChip’s human-inspired processing platform which is actually by design like our sensor […] then the half story we are missing from the beginning with Christoph is now complete.
Now we can tell a full story to our customers.”
So in a nutshell:
Neuromorphic vision sensor alone = half the story
Neuromorphic vision sensor + neuromorphic processor = full story
Nowhere did Luca Verre state that until Prophesee found Akida, they were worried they were building something as unstable as a “house of straw” with the companies they were already partnered with at the time (“Sony, Qualcomm, Intel and SynSense”).
From 25:35min
Rob Telson:
“So let’s talk about BrainChip and Prophesee. And, you know, I remember when we had you here in Laguna Hills at our facility, and we started to show you some of the demos that we were doing with some of your systems, and the time-frame it took us, and the excitement on Christoph’s face - woah, this is great! And we’re building upon that, we’re gonna continue driving that forward, the closeness between the Prophesee technology and what you guys have done and leveraging BrainChip’s, you know, neural network accelerator with Akia - Akida, excuse me - and what we’re doing. So let’s talk about that,
let’s talk about how they complement and enhance the performance of your products. And, just tell us a little bit about that.”
Luca Verre:
“
Yeah.
So I must say that we are very excited about this collaboration with BrainChip, because, I mean, we are natural partner. Our technology [sic] are very complementary. From the very beginning, when we started Prophesee with Christoph, we knew that we were actually building half the story, in fact. Because the retina per se
is an extension of the brain that is doing this fantastic job of preprocessing information, only sending what is relevant for the decision. But then the brain is doing the rest, is actually processing this event and then taking the decision. And today, what we are doing at Prophesee is that from the beginning we’ve been interfacing our sensor with a conventional compute platform based on conventional architecture that are today optimised for frame-based type of data, and therefore we faced, we have been facing, we are still facing some integration challenges that are sometimes also impacting, to some extent, the performance of the sensor itself, right? You need to make some trade-off.
So now combining our human-inspired sensor with BrainChip’s human-inspired processing platform which is actually by design like our sensor - conceived to actually process the sparse and the synchronous and fast data that are naturally generated by our sensor, then the half story we are missing from the beginning with Christoph is now complete.
Now we can tell a full story to our customers.
It is extremely powerful, because all the intrinsic benefit of this human-inspired technology, from the acquisition to the processing to the decision is now possible. So now we can really show, erm, really push the level of performance in terms of speed, in terms of efficiency to levels that are unprecedented in the industry.”