[ad_1]
OpenAI was at one point considering acquiring Cerebras, an AI chip maker that is in the process of going public, according to new legal filings.
Elon Musk’s ongoing lawsuit against OpenAI contains new documents describing how OpenAI was considering taking over Cerebras in or around 2017 — a year after Cerebras was founded, and only a few years after OpenAI began operating.
in Email Addressing OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Musk, Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s co-founder and former chief scientist, floated the idea of purchasing Cerebras through Tesla, Musk’s electric vehicle company. At the time, Musk was financially involved in OpenAI and had some influence on its direction.
“If we decide to buy Cerebras, my strong feeling is that it will be done through Tesla,” Sutskever wrote in September 2017, “but why do it this way if we can also do it from within OpenAI? Specifically, the concern is that Tesla It has a duty to shareholders to maximize shareholder return, which is not in line with OpenAI’s mission so the overall outcome may not ultimately be ideal for OpenAI.
In an earlier July 2017 email from Sutskever to Musk and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman (now the company’s president), Sutskever mentioned several agenda items related to Cerebras: “negotiating merger terms with Cerebras” and “further due diligence with Cerebras”.
The merger deal will ultimately fail, although it’s not clear from the exhibits why. And OpenAI will end up putting its chip ambitions on hold for years.
Cerebras, based in Sunnyvale, California, builds custom hardware to run and train AI models and claims its chips are faster and more efficient than Nvidia’s flagship offerings for AI workloads.
Having raised $715 million in venture capital, Cerebras is reportedly seeking to nearly double its $4 billion valuation through an IPO. But he faces Big challenges. One Abu Dhabi company, G42, accounted for 87% of Cerebras’ revenue in the first half of 2024, and US lawmakers have expressed concern about G42’s historical ties to China. Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman also has a checkered past, After he pleaded guilty to circumvent accounting controls while he was a vice president at publicly held Riverstone Networks.
If the acquisition had been completed, it would have benefited both companies. Cerebras could have avoided the path to a difficult IPO, while OpenAI may have had a vital resource in its race to build in-house chips.
OpenAI has long sought to reduce its dependence on Nvidia, which holds a huge share of the AI-optimized chip market. Although OpenAI is late to the in-house chip game — Google and Amazon Web Services, among others, have long offered chips designed for AI workloads — it is under pressure to reduce the cost of model training, fine-tuning and operation. Having its own chips can be one way to achieve the cuts you need.
OpenAI had at one point hoped to create a Factories network To manufacture chips, it was Looking Acquisition target. But it has reportedly abandoned those plans in favor of aggressively building a team of chip designers and engineers, working with semiconductor companies Broadcom and TSMC to create an AI chip to power the models. It could arrive as soon as 2026.
[ad_2]