Thirty years ago, a PhD student named Lin Yang at the University of California at Berkeley had an idea for a special kind of chip that would speed up computations for artificial intelligence. Think of it as a three-decade head start. Some of those insights are now reality, as Yang's startup company, Gyrfalcon Technology, of which he is chief scientist, moves forward with an ambitious string of different chip offerings for AI, hoping to best an increasingly crowded field of chip contenders. Gyrfalcon, based in Milpitas, on the edge of Silicon Valley, and founded in early 2017, is realizing Yang's insight from thirty years ago: a matrix of identical circuits performing matrix multiplications in parallel, thereby speeding up the fundamental operations of neural networks. "We are the only ones to get this far with matrix multiply as the fundamental compute element," says Gyrfalcon president Frank Lin, who sat down to talk with ZDNet.