The two challenges there are firstly - that analog design has been a separate electrical engineering school for most of a century, so there are few who could design it - and secondly - that every single chip will have subtle variations in its computations, necessitating some sort of model finetuning per chip. Possibly the chip could be characterised at the factory, and ship with the characterisation data burned into a controller rom or something, but if that doesn’t pan out the whole thing is likely a non-starter.

If it could be made to work, you could run a fable-grade model in tens of watts.

They can probably afford to do both.

That would be like skipping land line phones for mobile...

I'd assume that they have - but will keep mum 'till they have a major breakthrough or large-scale operational deployment to announce.