Cerebras is disrupting the market with Fast Inference

**Brian Gracely** (0:05)
Good morning, good evening, wherever you are. Welcome to The Enterprise AI Show. I'm your host, Brian Gracely. And today, we are going to dig into a couple of things. First and foremost, we're going to dig into a little behind the scenes on really the first major IPO of the generative AI era. We're going to dig into that. And also we're going to dig a little bit into kind of the innovation, the mindset that goes into really trying to change a paradigm, to change the status quo in the AI space. We're going to dig into that right after the break.
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We're back, and folks, if you've been listening to the show at all over the last couple of years, you know that one of the big things that we've talked about a lot throughout all the transitions that have been going on with generative AI over the last couple of years is really just this idea that, while we're seeing huge impact in terms of how it's changing business, how people are improving their workflow, they're getting productivity. You know, we've said for a long time, the overall economics of this market, and it's not unique to AI. We've seen it with cloud, we've seen it with mobile, we've seen it with the internet. Markets never get as big as possible without some diversity of the technologies that are out there that deal with lots of different use cases at different price points and different suppliers and sources. And AI is no different. We've talked about, you know, we really are going to need to see some unique innovation, some unique changes to business models in order to allow AI to get to that point. And today we're going to dive into something that I think is really going to be a part of that diversification, a part of that innovation. And really excited today to be joined by Andy Hock, who is Chief Strategy Officer at Cerebras AI, a company who is now getting a lot of very, very good headlines. So Andy, welcome to the show. Great to have you on.

**Andy Hock** (3:36)
Brian, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here. Indeed, exciting times in the world of AI compute.

**Brian Gracely** (3:40)
Yeah, absolutely. You are, as we joked just a few minutes ago, you are slightly hoarse. You're recording this a couple of weeks after your IPO. You're still coming off of that. Before we dive into all things Cerebras, the IPO, give us a little bit of your background because you've been doing this for quite a while. Give us your background and then really what's your focus on these days because you guys have a very front row seat as to what's happening in this incredibly fast moving market.

**Andy Hock** (4:08)
Absolutely.
I'll dive a little bit deeper into this as it may be relevant to some of your audience. The short version of the story is that I started at Cerebras a little over nine years ago in 2017 I joined Cerebras as our first product manager. We have an extraordinary team as we'll dive into later. We have a very unique and differentiated technology solution to AI. We have an incredible technology team and engineering team. But at that point in 2017, we were largely thinking about the technology. We weren't yet thinking about how to practically package that technology, both physically and virtually, to put it into the hands of users, meet our users where they are, and turn that technology into a product. So I joined about nine years ago. I built our OG PM team along with my colleagues, also built our solutions engineering team, would partner with our customers to help make them successful with the systems that we build. About two years ago, I shifted gears, continuing to work with our incredible CEO, Andrew Feldman, as our Chief Strategy Officer, to look forward a little bit more and to large partnerships like the ones that we have with G42, OpenAI, AWS, and also think about other partnerships around the world. And so these days, I lead that strategic partnerships for our product, as well as our federal business and our international business. The double-click that I promised before I go on too long is I ended up in this role in, I think, a rather circuitous and nontraditional route. I am a scientist by background. I'm a physicist. I did my early career work in algorithm development, then went on to build algorithms and satellite systems for remote sensing.