At Arm Tech Con today, West Lake Village, Calif.-based startup Eta Compute showed off what it believes is the first commercial low-power AI chip capable of learning on its own using a type of machine learning called spiking neural networks. Most AI chips for use in low-power or battery-operated IoT devices have a neural network that has been trained by a more powerful computer to do a particular job. A neural network that can do what’s called unsupervised learning can essentially train itself: Show it a pack of cards and it will figure out how to sort the threes from the fours from the fives.

Eta Compute’s third generation chip, called TENSAI, also does traditional deep learning using convolutional neural networks. Potential customers already have samples of the new chip, and the company expects to begin mass production in the first quarter of 2019.