AI Disruption: DeepSeek and Cerebras
Andy Hock and James Wang of Cerebras discuss how their wafer-scale silicon executes open-weight models like DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 70B faster than any number of GPUs, achieving 57x speedup by keeping all 44GB of model weights in on-chip SRAM. They explain that the release of efficient, open models like DeepSeek and Llama transformed Cerebras from an exotic supercomputer vendor into a provider of commodity inference APIs, standardizing the unit of sale as tokens. The guests highlight that hardware-software codesign and the shift toward reasoning models allow smaller teams to compete with well-funded incumbents by optimizing algorithms for specific architectures rather than relying on brute-force scaling.