I think any company that like pays their people over a certain amount of money should just use ultra fast mode because their people are like—
They're expensive and it's like, you know, if your person's making, you know, 500k or a million or more, you should have them use fast mode.
And even in many cases, if they make less, you should have them use like a fast inference cuz their time's expensive and like yeah, iterating is super fast.
Dylan, we are so excited to have you here today at Cerebras Supernova.
Hi, my name is Dylan. I guess I'm well known for talking about chips, as boring as that is—
Or exciting. How did all of this start? Like, why did you care about chips in the first place?
My Xbox broke when I was eight. I had to fix it. Had to open it up and fix it. It's called the Red Ring of Death. And then I stayed on the forums. And by the time I was 12, I was like moderating a bunch of forums. Basically, that's where it all started. And I had a bunch of other passions. You know, I get really obsessed with things. Like, I'm obsessed with your boots. Like, holy shit those are sick. Sorry, I had to compliment. And so, you know, I get obsessed with things. There was a little bit where I was obsessed with other things besides chips, but then I came back to it. Or rather, it was just like in the background always as a hobby. And then I made it into a job in 2020, I guess, when I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do. You know, my professional career was like was good. It was just like soul sucking.
Yeah. There are more and more different players in the chip space. A lot of them are very early and haven't shipped anything. But this morning we saw Etched announced that they shipped their first batch of hardware for Jane Street. And so in terms of all of these new players coming up, like what are the different bets that you're seeing people take? Do you think they stand a chance against the incumbents like Nvidia?
I think it's super exciting that Etched was able to go from like nothing to shipping a rack—
—in like just a couple of years. And so that's like super sick.
How do you think Etched was able to have so much like monetarily and like pre-commitments before they launched anything?
It's hard to say how many orders they actually have cuz like how real are those contracts? But ultimately, I think like a lot of people hated on them cuz they didn't have chip design expertise and it's like—
Yeah. But then instead they just like yo—I mean they hired people that did, but like they YOLOed the crap out of it and that's why they were able to get to successfully shipping like really, really quickly. There are other companies who started in the same timeframe and they are not shipping a chip yet, which is interesting. But generally, I think there's like a couple different bets. One is yappers, and the other one is like—there's like two types of hardware. There's like, "I want to make cheap enough, cheap tokens," and then there's, "I want to be a yapper." And the reason I say yapper is basically like Cerebras is a yapper.
Why? What does that mean?
Like think about someone who just talks really fast. They're a yapper. So Cerebras wafers are really, really good at super fast inference.
So I classify that as like yapper hardware.
This is patented by the way. But like, you know, there's other hardware out there like Groq that Nvidia bought that is yapper hardware. And like on the other spectrum, there's different ranges. Like if you want to do like efficient inference at like low speed or if you want to do yappers. And so I think different people have different approaches and also different targets. Some people are trying to be the fastest token spot possible. Some are trying to be the cheapest. Some are trying to be like some optimal on that Pareto curve. But generally, most people see that Nvidia is really good at throughput and they're mostly not targeting low, you know, low interactivity throughput cuz you can't get that much better than Nvidia there. Ultimately, you can be better, but you can't get that much better on a refined basis, but you can definitely get a lot better on yapping.
That's true. So obviously with Etched you see them go out with Jane Street. OpenAI last week for Ultra Fast also went out with Jane Street as our marquee customer. So obviously high-frequency trading is a trend there. But are there other like non-coding use cases and industries that you're seeing like really start to invest in AI or speed and compute?
