TechCrunch Disrupt 2026: Ricursive Intelligence’s Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini on when AI starts designing its own hardware

Ricursive Intelligence is developing AI systems that can design computer chips, learn from each design process, and improve subsequent designs. Currently, chip design takes two to three years, but the company aims to reduce that timeline to weeks. This matters because AI requires increasingly powerful chips to advance, yet chip design itself is a slow bottleneck, so automating and accelerating the process could create a feedback loop where better hardware enables more capable AI systems. The startup's founders previously led a similar project at Google that successfully generated chip layouts in hours rather than through traditional human-led design processes.