The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 137 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 10 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Nvidia Conceals Massive Chip Field Failure Rates to Keep Customers Waiting
“You don't talk about the field failure rate of your products, which are massive. Rather you sort of keep talking about the future in an effort to convince people to wait, to make a good decision rather than go with technology that's, that that's better and pre…”
Elon Musk and Tesla Failed at Building Wafer-Scale Chips for Dojo
“And after we did it Elon tried Dojo and they failed.”
Feldman: Nvidia Has Zero CUDA Software Lock-In for AI Inference
“In inference, it's not real at all. There's no CUDA lock-in in inference. None. Well, you can move from OpenAI on an NVIDIA GPU to Cerebrus to Fireworks Service on something else to Together to perplexity with 10 keystrokes. I mean, anybody who actually uses A…”
Feldman states the Trump administration is unwaveringly better for business
“Unwaveringly better for business. You know, there are things I agree with, there are things I disagree with in this administration, but unwaveringly better for business.”
Feldman claims Nvidia funds neoclouds to create competitors for traditional hyperscalers
“I think it has been NVIDIA's strategy to try and create competitors for the traditional hyperscalers. They have funded and backstopped and over allocated to the neoclouds. They have created a dependence, which is probably not healthy.”
Feldman says Elon Musk sold outdated H100 hardware in suboptimal deals
“They got H 100. They didn't get the B 200. They didn't get the most current. They are a generation and a half, maybe two generations behind. So the, this was not a great deal. It was a good deal for Elon. He had them sitting around, but they were forced to tak…”
Feldman asserts 90% to 95% of recent tech layoffs are AI-washed
“I think to date, most of the layoffs were AI washed. They were, because we did boneheaded hiring, During COVID. It is actually because a great deal of productivity gains has been, have occurred over the years that we're just now harvesting. The ability to gath…”
Feldman asserts China will inevitably use advanced US chips for military applications
“If we sell leading edge technology to China, will their military use it? Everybody says yes. There is no debate on that point. Their military will use it. You ask a second question, which is, if you sell our leading edge technology, will they, will their gover…”
Feldman proposes granting TSMC and Samsung 20-year exemptions from local US ordinances
“I would allow TSMC and Samsung both to a 20 year period free from all local and legal, local ordinances, all of them, to build fabs in their desired location in the US.”
Feldman argues Europe's regulate-and-tax culture stifles tech entrepreneurship
“There has emerged in Europe a sort of be afraid of it, then regulate it, tax it, or sort of mentality that works against entrepreneurship.”
No Company Ever Went Bankrupt by Overpaying Extraordinary Talent
“No company ever went bankrupt by paying extraordinary people too much.”
Feldman: Cerebras chips are faster than Nvidia at both training and inference
“No, we're faster on both, but the software challenges In training are real.”
In AI Inference, Nobody Cares About Nvidia's CUDA or PyTorch
“In inference, the truth is, nobody cares about CUDA. Nobody even cares about PyTorch. All right. What they want is an API.”
Biden Administration AI Policy Was Misguided and Afraid Compared to Trump's
“I think it's confusing. And on net, it's probably more to help. The Biden administration was misguided and afraid. And I think the Trump administration, I think to his credit, they surrounded himself with some smart people and in the AI space. And I think they…”
The Silicon Industry Is Not a Place for 25-Year-Old CEOs
“The silicon industry is not a place for twenty-five-year-old CEOs, no matter how smart you are. The returns to having built parts before in what we do are enormous.”
Feldman: GPU off-chip memory architecture can be beaten in inference
“The fundamental architecture of the GPU with off-chip memory is not great for inference. Now, they will continue to do well in inference, but it can be beaten, and I think they know it.”
Feldman: Cerebras Is First to Yield Whole Wafers in Computing History
“And that had never been done in a computer before, and that's at the heart of our architecture. That allowed us to yield and deliver whole wafers. Nobody had ever been able to do that in the seventy-year history of our industry.”
Feldman: ChatGPT was a UI invention, not a technical innovation
“ChatGPT was not really a technical innovation. It was a user interface invention.”
Feldman: US export controls led US VCs to fund Chinese EDA startups
“You, ah, sought to limit Chinese access to EDA tools to delay the growth of a Chinese chip market. And so U.S. Venture capitalists backed tons of Chinese companies in Shenzhen to build EDA tools, right?”
Feldman: Western tech leaders fundamentally underestimate China's AI capabilities
“A hundred percent. I think, and it is one of the most obvious and frequent errors in judgment. Is that you underestimate the other side. I think, ah, you have to look carefully at what they're doing, and their investment in infrastructure has been extraordinar…”
Feldman claims Micron achieves software-like 80% to 85% margins on memory
“Micron is producing numbers where they have 80, 85% gross margins. I mean, they're getting software gross margins on making memory.”
Feldman claims Cerebras chips are 15 times faster than competing GPUs
“Now, we are 15 x faster because of architectural reasons.”
Feldman claims NeoClouds face massive cost disadvantages buying Nvidia hardware
“When Google or when Cerebris puts our equipment in our own data center, right, we have a significant advantage Over a NeoCloud, because NeoClouds are buying hardware with gross margins of 70, 80% for NVIDIA.”
Feldman predicts there will be zero market for slow AI inference
“Why do we believe that inference will be any different? There'll be zero marking for slowing them.”
Feldman predicts AI productivity gains will increase engineering hiring, not reduce it
“If we get, as we get more productive, we do more things, we're gonna hire more engineers. We're not gonna hire less engineers.”
Feldman asserts legal and security teams bottleneck enterprise AI adoption
“The wide scale adoption and use of AI in organizations is today limited by security and legal.”
Feldman says top Chinese open-source AI models lag closed-source models slightly
“This is made doubly worse by some of the best open source models were made by Chinese companies. And they are exceptionally good models. Kimi Ketu, Deep Seek. When the GLM, these are extraordinarily good models. They're not quite as good as the closed source m…”
Feldman claims Cerebras is the only pure-play AI public company
“But what we did know was that we had a chance to be the first and only AI peer play in the entire market. There's only one, and that's us.”
Feldman: Quantization from 8-bit to 4-bit won't solve AI scaling
“I think incremental improvements make believe gains achieved by dropping from, you know, eight bit to four bit. Those aren't gonna get us to the promised land in AI.”
Multi-Billion-Dollar AI Deal Announcements Are Just Options on Future Compute
“I think you should think about sort of these announcements as sort of options on the future. Right. That's really the way to think about it is in an unknown environment, how can I take an option on the future? I don't know if I'll use it all, but I'll pay some…”
Feldman: Global economy will reorganize around AI within five years
“However is it possible that our economy looks very different? In five years. Is it possible that, ah, the things we value, ah, are very different? That we have reorganized around AI. We've seen a major bump in, in labor productivity. We have benefited dramatic…”
Nvidia Invested in OpenAI Primarily to Lock Up Chip Demand
“Beyond the fact that, that Nvidia has chosen to try and lock up a portion of OpenAI's demand. By investing in them. That, that, that's about as much as you can say.”
Feldman: Claims of a two-year AI chip depreciation cycle are wrong
“I think people are clearly still getting value from H-one hundreds, and that's more than two years, right? So you know If you say it's a two-year depreciation, you're empirically wrong, right? I mean, they are and I think people are still getting value from A-…”
Feldman: Memory bandwidth, not compute speed, limits GPU AI inference
“And that includes memory, which has, for inference, is the fundamental limiter for the GPU architecture. And so it doesn't matter how much faster the chip goes. It matters how much faster the memory bandwidth is.”
Feldman: The tech industry is 100% underestimating the AI inference market size
“I think the reason I'm a hundred percent sure that, that we are underestimating the market is because of that premise.”
US AI Power Constraint Is Geographical Mismatch, Not Total Supply
“People often say we don't have enough power in the US, and this is strictly wrong. We have plenty of power. It's in the wrong places, right? It's not where we have people or where we have fiber optic cable.”
Nvidia Is the 21st Century's Greatest Company; Valuation May Be Too Low
“I think they've proven themselves to be the greatest company of the first quarter of the 21st century, right? 21st century. They've proven themselves to be the extraordinary company in the first quarter of the century, and I don't know if four trillion's right…”
Fast-Moving Software Development Culture Fails in Chip Manufacturing
“Modern software does not fit well In a chip making framework. I mean, weekly sprints don't work well on two year long projects. You know, move fast, break things often is not the way you think in the chip world. The way you think in the chip world is measure t…”
Feldman: Cerebras achieved higher valuation because rival chip startups had negative margins
“I think the reason we were able to raise it a higher valuation and from better investors and more money is because we had them. Right? And others who were out looking for mark, looking for money had negative margins.”
Nvidia Charges Gross Margins Between 78% and 85% on High-End Chips
“Well, because they want to get rid of the 78% gross margin that NVIDIA is charging. That's why it makes sense. Just like that. It might be, on the high-end chips, 85%.”
Feldman: Cerebras passed on a major China deal in 2019 before export controls
“We had a huge opportunity in, in 2019 to do a deal in China, and I decided to pass because I didn't think it was the right thing to do. Long before the Department of Commerce limited exports to China, I didn't think it was right.”
Chinese Government Reimburses Venture Funds for Losses on AI Investments
“They backstop their venture groups, right? So if you lost money in an AI company, the government would make you whole.”
Local fire ordinances delayed Samsung's Texas fab by up to 10 months
“Samsung built a fab in Texas, and they had to change the design of a fab because they had local fire ordinance. And the U.S. Government worked for years to get deployment of billions of dollars in taxes, and a local fire ordinance set them back eight months, 1…”
UAE Accounted for 75% to 80% of Cerebras' H1 2024 Revenue
“I think in the S-one it says and that was for maybe the first half of 24, we haven't published others, but a lot. I think 75, 80%.”
DeepMind's AlphaFold Has Not Yet Produced a Single Drug
“AlphaFold solved one of the hardest problems in in chemistry. A problem that had been open for years. Name a drug that's resulted from it. Not one.”
Feldman: Building something great requires every waking minute, not a 40-hour week
“This notion that, that somehow you can achieve greatness. You can build something extraordinary by working 38 hours a week and having work-life balance. That, that is mind-boggling to me. It's not true in any part of life. And your willingness to jump in and s…”