Uncapped #57 | Andrew Feldman from Cerebras

<p>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&#39;s largest chip, the Wafer Scale Engine, and counts the US government, sovereign cloud providers, and OpenAI among its customers.</p><p>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&#39;s near-death experience: 18 months of board meetings where the only thing to report was &quot;still can&#39;t make it,&quot; 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. </p><p><br></p><p>Timestamps:</p><p>(0:00) Intro</p><p>(1:07) Why Andrew started Cerebras in 2016</p><p>(2:54) Eric on why he invested despite having no chip experience</p><p>(4:10) Attacking Goliath</p><p>(9:44) Near-death experiences and the Valley of Death</p><p>(10:44) 18 months of &quot;still can&#39;t make it&quot;</p><p>(12:16) Solving a 75-year-old compute problem</p><p>(13:26) What comes after Wafer Scale</p><p>(16:19) The chip supply chain explained</p><p>(22:30) Why the US punted a strategic industry</p><p>(25:51) How to be a good hardware board member</p><p>(27:50) Hardware vs. software investing</p><p>(29:05) The pivot from training to inference</p><p>(27:00) Specialization vs. flexibility</p><p>(35:22) Young product leaders and seasoned hardware engineers</p><p>(39:14) External relationships and TSMC</p><p>(42:20) The AI infrastructure buildout</p><p>(44:12) The data center supply chain</p><p>(53:14) Speed creates markets</p><p>(54:10) Disaggregation with AMD and AWS</p><p>(55:24) What actually makes Nvidia great</p><p>(57:30) Near-death experiences and the DNA of a Goliath fighter</p><p>(59:58) Andrew&#39;s childhood next to William Shockley</p><p><br></p><p>Links:</p><p><a href="https://x.com/andrewdfeldman"><u>https://x.com/andrewdfeldman</u></a></p><p><a href="https://x.com/cerebras"><u>https://x.com/cere