Cerebras Co-Founder And Others Talk About AI Hardware

At this year’s The Next Endeavour event at Google Bay View in San Jose, I sat down with Andrew Feldman, co-founder and CEO of Cerebras Systems, along with Atiq Raza, a prominent semiconductor pioneer, and entrepreneur and investor Dave Blundin, also, as I noted, my business partner by day at Link Ventures, to talk about how hardware is advancing in the AI world. I wanted to share some insights that came out of this.

We are at a crossroads with AI hardware. Some consider the proliferation of Nvidia GPUs to be a “bubble.” Some think the AI will kill us all, and the only way to stop it is to constrain it at a hardware level. So this stuff is controversial right now. But if you want extended commentary on the nuts and bolts of innovating in this field, from people who have been doing it a long time, read on.

The Cerebras Dinner Plate

The Cerebras “dinner plate,” or WSE-3, so named for its 9” surface, has 4 trillion transistors across 900,000 processing cores. It’s a big piece of hardware. And Feldman, for our conversation, actually had one with him.

“We embarked 10 years ago on a big journey,” he explained, suggesting that the people at Cerebras were driven by inspiration, not just money. “We do this because we really don’t know how to not build stuff.”

Now, Feldman said, the company has a $25 billion backlog, with a plan to increase production by 8x this year, and 8x next year.

“It is just an extraordinary time,” he said.

Feldman also spoke to strategy, and longevity in a quickly changing business world.

“The right way to get the timing right in the startup world is to be wrong for a long time, and not be dead,” he said, chronicling some of the Cerebras story. “We had achieved what was one of the holy grails, and absolutely nobody cared, because fast AI didn’t make any sense when the AI was dumb, and now the AI is smart, and getting faster, getting smarter, at an extraordinary rate, and everybody wants answers more quickly.”