The Story Behind Cerebras’ $63 Billion IPO with Founder and CEO Andrew Feldman

Companies in Silicon Valley from Nvidia to AMD are racing to fuel the AI revolution with postage stamp-sized AI chips. Meanwhile, a chip the size of a dinner plate just fueled a $63 billion IPO for Cerebras. Elad Gil and Sarah Guo sit down with Cerebras founder and CEO Andrew Feldman to discuss the company’s journey to making one of the largest tech go-publics in history. Andrew details the multi-year journey of pioneering wafer-scale AI computing, including surviving a brutal period of being ahead of market demand. He also explains the engineering breakthroughs that led to delivering inference speeds at 20x that of standard GPUs. Andrew then shares how a remarkable $20 billion deal with OpenAI came together in only four weeks. Plus, Andrew’s thoughts on why architecting the future of AI requires the fortitude to be a “professional David” against the Goliaths of tech.

Chapters:

00:00 – Cold Open

00:36 – Andrew Feldman Introduction

01:19 – Cerebras’ Evolution

02:48 – Wafer-Scale Bet Pays Off

06:38 – Challenges and Breakthroughs

08:37 – Crossing the Market Chasm

10:38 – Scaling Software and Hardware

12:03 – Relevance of AI-Generated Coding

13:31 – Leadership and Hiring Culture

17:16 – When to Quit vs. Persist

19:40 – Why Cerebras Went Public

22:57 – The OpenAI Deal

25:54 – Open Source and Post-Trained Workloads

27:37 – How Speed Opens Up New Business

30:33 – Conclusion