Ricursive Intelligence founders Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini, who previously developed the AlphaChip system, told TechCrunch Disrupt their startup is building AI that designs chips, learns from each iteration and improves the next design. Goldie said compute demand could grow at least 10,000-fold in five years and argued for more efficient chips over more data centers. They say they optimize whole chips rather than splitting them into dozens of blocks, and that a one-week design cycle would make custom chips for niches like AR, space and biological computing worthwhile. Results beyond AlphaChip have not yet been published.