Uncapped #57 | Andrew Feldman from Cerebras

Andrew Feldman is the co-founder and CEO of Cerebras Systems, the AI chip company he founded in 2016 around a single radical insight: that winning in compute requires not incremental improvement but a fundamentally different architecture. Cerebras is the creator of the world's largest chip, the Wafer Scale Engine, and counts the US government, sovereign cloud providers, and OpenAI among its customers.

Alongside Eric Vishria from Benchmark, we discussed why Andrew believes that if you are going to attack Goliath, being 10% or even twice as good is not an available strategy and you have to aim for 100x or 500x better. Andrew walked through Cerebras's near-death experience: 18 months of board meetings where the only thing to report was "still can't make it," spending $8 million a month, and what kept the team going. He explained how we go from sand to a ChatGPT answer and why the US semiconductor supply chain is in a precarious position. Andrew shared what most people get wrong about what makes Nvidia great (it’s not CUDA), and why he thinks of himself as a professional David in an ongoing battle with Goliath.

Timestamps:

(0:00) Intro

(1:07) Why Andrew started Cerebras in 2016

(2:54) Eric on why he invested despite having no chip experience

(4:10) Attacking Goliath

(9:44) Near-death experiences and the Valley of Death

(10:44) 18 months of "still can't make it"

(12:16) Solving a 75-year-old compute problem

(13:26) What comes after Wafer Scale

(16:19) The chip supply chain explained

(22:30) Why the US punted a strategic industry

(25:51) How to be a good hardware board member

(27:50) Hardware vs. software investing

(29:05) The pivot from training to inference

(27:00) Specialization vs. flexibility

(35:22) Young product leaders and seasoned hardware engineers

(39:14) External relationships and TSMC

(42:20) The AI infrastructure buildout

(44:12) The data center supply chain

(53:14) Speed creates markets

(54:10) Disaggregation with AMD and AWS

(55:24) What actually makes Nvidia great

(57:30) Near-death experiences and the DNA of a Goliath fighter

(59:58) Andrew's childhood next to William Shockley

Links:

https://x.com/andrewdfeldman

https://x.com/cerebras

https://x.com/ericvishria

https://x.com/jaltma

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