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AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

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Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#81

Post by bee_rider »

artemisart wrote: post #41
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…

Correction: it's 8x the TFLOPS of a DGX (8 H100), not 1 H100. But it's true that if it stays at $3M it's probably too much and I don't think the memory bottleneck on gpus is large enough to justify this price/performance.

If you have a problem that you can’t easily split up into 64 chunks, I guess it makes more sense, right?

Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#83

Post by parentheses »

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.

Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#84

Post by ClassyJacket »

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.

Plenty of companies IPO before releasing anything, or before building a large audience. That's how lots of things that requite a long lead time and large initial investment get made. It's just a bigger risk for the investors.

Tesla IPOed in 2010 after selling only a few hundred Roadsters.

Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#85

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#86

Post by fakedang »

theogravity wrote: post #39
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seemed surprised that this company is having an IPO to actually raise funds for operations and expansion, vs as just an "exit" where VCs and other insiders can dump their shares onto the broader public. I might be a bit suspicious if a company in some low-capital-intensive industry was IPOing while unprofitable, but this is chip making. Even if they're not making their own fabs this is still an industry with high…

Does this mean that they couldn't find VCs to raise more cash?

Cerebras is currently heavily backed by the Emirati government's sovereign wealth fund.

Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#87

Post by TrapLord_Rhodo »

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.

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.

Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#88

Post by rajnathani »

twothreeone wrote: post #66
7e wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the end of the day, Cerebras has not submitted any MLPerf results (of which I am aware). That means they are hiding something. Something not very competitive. So, performance is iffy. Density for density sake doesn’t matter since clusters are power limited.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/cerebras-launches-world-faste...

Nothing for the training part of MLPerf's benchmark. If they're competing just on inference, then they have stiff competition from specialized NPU-for-inference makers like Hailo (see: it's even part of the official Raspberry Pi AI kit), Qualcomm, tons of other players, and also some players using optics instead of electrons for inference such as Lightmatter, and also SIMD on highly abundant CPU servers which are never in shortage unlike GPUs (and have recently gotten support for specialized inference ops besides simply SIMD ones).

Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#89

Post by hulitu »

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…

> Sure Cerebras is unique in that they make one large chip out of the entire wafer

I'm sure tgey test it thoroughly. /s

Re: AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO

#90

Post by JumpCrisscross »

TrapLord_Rhodo wrote: post #87
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.

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 forces you to be right and on time.

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