Why the Future of AI Won’t Live in the Cloud with Sam Fok

What happens when a neuroscientist stops asking why the brain works the way it does and starts building his own version in silicon?

Sam Fok, co-founder and CEO of femtoAI, joins Greg to explore the journey from studying neurons to designing ultra efficient AI chips for real world devices. Growing up in a household of scientists, Sam was drawn early to questions about intelligence and consciousness. That curiosity eventually led him from neuroscience labs to Stanford’s Brains in Silicon Lab and into the world of neuromorphic engineering.

Today, femtoAI is building brain inspired hardware and software that brings AI out of massive data centers and into everyday products such as wearables, appliances, robotics, and consumer electronics. The goal is simple but ambitious: make AI run efficiently in the real world without straining power grids, supply chains, and balance sheets.

Greg and Sam dive into the technical, commercial, and personal pivots required to turn deep research into a scalable company, including the hard decision to rebuild their core platform from the ground up.

Highlights:

• Sam’s path from neuroscience and recording brain signals to building neuromorphic chips at Stanford
• The founding story of femtoAI and why timing mattered as AI crossed from research curiosity to commercial force
• How femtoAI enables AI to run directly on devices like glasses, earbuds, appliances, and robots instead of relying on the cloud
• Why sparse computation and localized processing, inspired by biology, are key to unlocking efficient edge AI
• The massive pivot from PhD era technology to a commercially viable platform built for manufacturability and scale
• The tension between academic incentives and commercial realities, from benchmarks and novelty to reliability and reproducibility
• Two distinct customer profiles: companies that want turnkey AI features and those that want full stack tools to build their own models
• Why ease of use and integration often matter more than technical elegance
• Lessons on earning credibility in deep tech by delivering real, testable results rather than selling grand visions
• Building highly technical teams with intellectual curiosity and cross stack awareness
• The importance of trust and empowerment when leading engineers across silicon, firmware, compilers, and AI tooling
• Why Sam believes today’s dominant AI approaches alone will not be enough to reach truly general robotics
• What the next three to five years could look like as intelligence spreads across devices and environments

If you are building AI powered hardware, deploying robots, or thinking about how to bring intelligence out of the cloud and into physical products, this conversation offers a grounded look at what it really takes to make AI usable, efficient, and scalable in the real world.

Learn more about femtoAI: https://femto.ai/

Developer portal: https://developer.femto.ai/

Connect with Sam Fok: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-fok/

Connect with Greg Toroosian: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregtoroosian/