AI Disruption: DeepSeek and Cerebras

Oxide and Friends · 6 Feb 2025 · 1h 31m · Episode 4

What this episode covers

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.

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