AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO • Hacker News Board

Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#101

Post by pldpb » Tue, Oct 01, 2024, 9:19 AM UTC

blurbleblurble wrote: post #31

will-burner wrote: post #2

This is the first I've heard of Cerebras Systems. From the article >Cerebras had a net loss of $66.6 million in the first six months of 2024 on $136.4 million in sales, according to the filing. That doesn't sound very good. What makes them think they can compete with Nvidia, and why IPO right now? Are they trying to get government money to make chip fabs like Intel or something?

Their tech is very impressive, look it up.

It's a deadend. SRAM doesn't scale on advanced nodes.

Similar to Tenstorrent who chose GDDR instead of HBM, they throught production AI models won't get bigger than GPT3.5 due to cost.

Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#102

Post by alecco » Tue, Oct 01, 2024, 9:23 AM UTC

If Cerebras keeps improving it will be a decent contender to Nvidia. Nvidia VRAM-SRAM is a bottleneck. For just inference, it needs to download a model at least once per token (divided by batch size). The bottleneck is not Tensor Cores but memory transfers. They say it themselves. Cerebras fixes that (at a cost of software complexity and narrower target solution).

Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#103

Post by Nokinside » Tue, Oct 01, 2024, 9:49 AM UTC

They use the whole wafer for a chip (wafer scale). The WSE-3 chip is optimized for sparse linear algebra ops, used 5nm TSMC process.

Their idea is to have 44 GB SRAM per chip. SRAM is _very_expensive_ compared to DRAM (about two orders of magnitude).

It's easy to design larger chip. What determines the price/performance ratio are things like

- performance per chip area.

- yield per chip area.

Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#104

Post by short_sells_poo » Tue, Oct 01, 2024, 10:13 AM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #90

TrapLord_Rhodo wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rev for last 2 years: $24.6M $78.7M $270M($136.4M) Sounds like a rocketship. You also get a better sharp if you take some money off the table in the form of leverage and put it in other firms within the industry. E.G. Leveraging your NVDA shares and buying Cerebras.

> take some money off the table in the form of leverage and put it in other firms within the industry. E.G. Leveraging your NVDA shares and buying Cerebras Please don't do this. Sell your Nvidia shares and rebalance to Cerebras, whatever. But financially leveraging a high-multiple play to buy a correlated asset (which is also high multiple) is begging for a margin call. You may wind up having been right. But leverage…

You are so on point! A huge number of amateur investors get obliterated on this. Your call may be right, but that's no help if you don't survive to see it realized.

You may have a hugely profitable idea that could realize crazy gains over a 5 year horizon, but if you get margin called and liquidated in year 3, you'll end up with nothing.

The magic of investment is compound returns, not crazy leverage. Take some of the crazy Nvidia profits and reinvest it elsewhere where you expect geometric growth. Keep things decently diversified.

Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#105

Post by rwmj » Tue, Oct 01, 2024, 10:45 AM UTC

yieldcrv wrote: post #40

knowitnone wrote: post #32

NVIDIA is pretty established but there's also Intel, AMD, Google to contend with. Sure Cerebras is unique in that they make one large chip out of the entire wafer but nothing prevents these other companies from doing the same thing. Currently they are choosing not to because of wafer economics but if they chose to, Cerebras would pretty much lose their advantage. https://www.servethehome.com/cerebras-wse-3-ai-chip-la…

they don’t need an advantage, they just need orders and inventory get extorted by nvidia sales people for a 2026 delivery date that gets pushed out if you say anything about it or decline cloud services or another provider delivering earlier thats what the market wants, and even then, who cares? this company is trying to IPO at whay valuation? this article didnt say but the last valuation was like $1.5bn? so you mean…

At the end of the day it's all made in the same factory. If nVidia have problems delivering then so do Cerebras.

Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#106

Post by imdoxxingme » Tue, Oct 01, 2024, 11:17 AM UTC

brk wrote: post #17

I’m going to go ahead and predict this flubs long term. Not only is what they are doing very challenging, I’ve had some random brokerage house reach out to me multiple times about investing in this IPO. When your IPO process resorts to cold calling I don’t think it’s a good sign. Granted I have some associations with AI startups I don’t think that had anything to do with the outreach from the firm.

You do realize that brokerages earn commissions on selling shares, so why wouldn't they contact people who may be interested?

Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#107

Post by imdoxxingme » Tue, Oct 01, 2024, 11:25 AM UTC

tempusalaria wrote: post #30

On the one hand, the financials are terrible for an IPO in this market. On the other, Nvidia is worth 3trn so they can sell a pretty good dream of what success looks like to investors. Personally I would expect them to get a valuation well about the 4bln from the 2021 round, despite the financials not coming close to justifying it.

Saying the financials are terrible is a bit of a stretch. Rapidly growing revenue, decreasing loss/share and a loss/share similar to other companies that IPO'ed this year.

The more concerning thing is just not having diversity of revenue, since most of it comes from G42.

Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#108

Post by BuckYeah » Tue, Oct 01, 2024, 12:14 PM UTC

pants2 wrote: post #34

knowitnone wrote: post #32

NVIDIA is pretty established but there's also Intel, AMD, Google to contend with. Sure Cerebras is unique in that they make one large chip out of the entire wafer but nothing prevents these other companies from doing the same thing. Currently they are choosing not to because of wafer economics but if they chose to, Cerebras would pretty much lose their advantage. https://www.servethehome.com/cerebras-wse-3-ai-chip-la…

Agreed, it just seems like Nvidia chips are going to be easier to produce at scale. Cerberas will be limited to a few niche use-cases, like HFT where hedge funds are using LLMs to analyze SEC filings as fast as possible.

Where/how did you learn of the hedge fund usages?

Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#109

Post by cootsnuck » Tue, Oct 01, 2024, 1:06 PM UTC

Concerning in terms of hype bubble now having even more exposure to the stock market. Perhaps less concerning since it's a hardware startup? Nah, nvm, I think this will end up cratered within 3 years.

Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#110

Post by cootsnuck » Tue, Oct 01, 2024, 1:09 PM UTC

parentheses wrote: post #83

So many things here smell funny... I have never heard of any models trained on this hardware. How does a company IPO on the basis of having the "best tech" in this industry, when all the top models are trained on other hardware. It just doesn't add up.

I thought they were fore inference not training...either way, kind of is concerning that I've heard about them plenty from the hype bubble but I apparently still don't really understand what they do.