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Databricks’ former AI chief thinks he can cut AI’s power bill by 1,000x

TechCrunch AI · Jun 25, 2026, 4:48 PM

Key takeaways

  • The drive to discover the next big thing in AI has funded some pretty ambitious projects — but one company is taking it as a chance to rebuild computing architecture from the ground up.
  • Led by Naveen Rao, formerly the head of AI at Databricks, Unconventional AI promises to make inference processing vastly more power efficient.
  • On Thursday, the company released its first model AI — called Un0 — an image-generation system tool that shows for the first time how the company s technology can replicate conventional AI systems.

Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.

The drive to discover the next big thing in AI has funded some pretty ambitious projects — but one company is taking it as a chance to rebuild computing architecture from the ground up.

Led by Naveen Rao, formerly the head of AI at Databricks, Unconventional AI promises to make inference processing vastly more power efficient. The secret weapon: a new kind of oscillator-based computer architecture.

On Thursday, the company released its first model AI — called Un0 — an image-generation system tool that shows for the first time how the company s technology can replicate conventional AI systems. In an accompanying new paper, the company’s research team details how they built a fully functional image generation model using a software simulation of the new architecture — one that performs just as well as state-of-the-art diffusion models.

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