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Michael James

Co-Founder & Chief Architect, Cerebras Systems · 1 appearance on the record.

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founderengineerexecutivecerebras.ai ↗

Michael James co-founded Cerebras Systems in 2015, where he leads architectural development for the company's Wafer-Scale Engine processors and AI supercomputers. Prior to Cerebras, he served as lead software architect at SeaMicro and as a Fellow at AMD.

21statements → 15claims → 12claims resolved → 92%fully supported → 4.14/5average certainty → 1.76/5average debate potential →

11 supported 0 partly supported 1 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 2 not checkable as stated how the 15 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 14 assertions · 2 opinions · 2 insights · 1 disclosure · 1 what if · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 15 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 12 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Michael argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
The Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine is the world's largest processor
“This is the world's largest processor.”
Michael James Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 7:13 Designing an AI Supercomputer // Michael James, Cerebras (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
Cerebras built the first supercomputer designed end-to-end for AI
“And it's also the first supercomputer that has been designed from beginning to end for artificial intelligence and deep learning.”
Michael James Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 0:33 Designing an AI Supercomputer // Michael James, Cerebras (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
none yet certainty 3
83% certainty 4
100% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: speaking style how? →

265 words/min while actually speaking · 26.5 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Michael James: only 1 usable question→answer exchange on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 3,319 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Michael James said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Prediction Open · timeframe Feb 2035
Quantum and optical computing remain 10 to 15 years away from production
“We think that because that's primary research, that, that's a good, ah, 10 to 15 years out, whereas what we looked to do was to take, ah, pre, ah, technology we could manufacture, maybe difficult, but all achievable, so we weren't trying to invent any new law …”
Michael James Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 19:33 Designing an AI Supercomputer // Michael James, Cerebras (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Contradicted
Cerebras built the first supercomputer designed end-to-end for AI
“And it's also the first supercomputer that has been designed from beginning to end for artificial intelligence and deep learning.”
Michael James Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 0:33 Designing an AI Supercomputer // Michael James, Cerebras (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Insight
New computing workloads always demand purpose-built hardware
“When we look throughout the history of computing, it has never happened that a new important workload has come along, and the correct answer to that workload was to use some pre-existing equipment that had been designed to do something else”
Michael James Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 4:03 Designing an AI Supercomputer // Michael James, Cerebras (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Opinion
Von Neumann architecture might not be the right path for AI
“So, so maybe there's a sign that, that we're not on the right track with the architecture we have in, in von Neumann computers.”
Michael James Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 5:38 Designing an AI Supercomputer // Michael James, Cerebras (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Disclosure
Cerebras designed a chip as large as possible with interleaved memory
“We decided to build a machine that was as large as we could, that had memory interleaved directly with the computational substrate.”
Michael James Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 6:44 Designing an AI Supercomputer // Michael James, Cerebras (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Supported
The Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine is the world's largest processor
“This is the world's largest processor.”
Michael James Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 7:13 Designing an AI Supercomputer // Michael James, Cerebras (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Supported
Cerebras's WSE is the first chip with over 1 trillion transistors
“It is the first part that has over a trillion transistors, and we're here, and at 1.2, and it has 400,000 sparse linear algebra cores on it.”
Michael James Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 7:26 Designing an AI Supercomputer // Michael James, Cerebras (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Supported
Cerebras's WSE delivers 9 petabytes per second of memory bandwidth
“There's 18 gigabytes of memory right, right on that, ah, on that silicon wafer, and it gives an unprecedented nine gigabytes per second, sorry, nine petabytes per second of memory bandwidth.”
Michael James Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 7:42 Designing an AI Supercomputer // Michael James, Cerebras (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Supported
Cerebras routes around manufacturing defects across its 400,000 cores
“By having 400,000 independent cores, it's perfectly fine if we have a few hundred defects on there, and it's only our job to route the information flows around those defects.”
Michael James Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 8:53 Designing an AI Supercomputer // Michael James, Cerebras (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Supported
Cerebras's chip provides 10,000x the memory bandwidth of standard GPUs
“So, having solved this, we were left with a machine that was pretty impressive on most of the metrics, being larger, more cores, 10,000 times the memory bandwidth and 33,000 times the fabric bandwidth.”
Michael James Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 13:10 Designing an AI Supercomputer // Michael James, Cerebras (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Insight
James: Deep learning models rely on data flow, not instruction-driven loops
“The models we're producing don't work based on instructions. It, it's not a central operator that says do this, do that. Instead it's the data that flows over our model and a simple feedback equation that tells that data how to manipulate and transform the mod…”
Michael James Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 6:25 Designing an AI Supercomputer // Michael James, Cerebras (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Wafer-scale chips were previously presumed impossible to build
“And when we showed this the world got pretty excited, so there was a large press splash, and in part that's because this had been presumed to be impossible to achieve.”
Michael James Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 8:19 Designing an AI Supercomputer // Michael James, Cerebras (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Supported
Cerebras's first customer was the U.S. National Labs
“It's pretty unusual in Silicon Valley to have your first customer be the U.S. National Labs”
Michael James Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 14:46 Designing an AI Supercomputer // Michael James, Cerebras (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Supported
No motherboard had ever housed a processor as large as Cerebras's
“No one before had ever put a processor that large in a motherboard, and so we had to also make a system to house this thing.”
Michael James Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 9:19 Designing an AI Supercomputer // Michael James, Cerebras (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Supported
Cerebras CS-1 system enclosure contains a single wafer plus cooling hardware
“There's only one wafer mounted in there, and the entire rest of this is about, ah, cooling and power delivery.”
Michael James Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 9:39 Designing an AI Supercomputer // Michael James, Cerebras (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
What-if
Traditional power delivery would carry 40,000 amps and melt Cerebras's processor
“We would have 40,000 amps, and that would actually melt the part if we chose to do it that way, so we had to bring some of the geometric thinking beyond how we think geometry in the models into this three D structure.”
Michael James Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 10:02 Designing an AI Supercomputer // Michael James, Cerebras (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Michael James: Cerebras succeeded at reticle stitching on the first attempt
“Reticle stitching to get above the optical limit of how you manufacture these things that worked the first time we tried it.”
Michael James Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 10:50 Designing an AI Supercomputer // Michael James, Cerebras (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Opinion
Programming Cerebras's engine is simpler than programming conventional computers
“So again, the simpler, ah, I think simpler than programming a conventional computer where you have to specify millions of instructions.”
Michael James Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 13:29 Designing an AI Supercomputer // Michael James, Cerebras (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Supported
Cerebras maps neural network layers across 400,000 chip cores
“We have, ah, an optimization solver that places these over the 400,000 cores.”
Michael James Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 14:21 Designing an AI Supercomputer // Michael James, Cerebras (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Supported
Lawrence Livermore integrated Cerebras into its Lassen supercomputer
“Lawrence Livermore has integrated into their Lassen supercomputer.”
Michael James Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 15:08 Designing an AI Supercomputer // Michael James, Cerebras (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Supported
Cerebras' Wafer Scale Engine is fabricated at TSMC
“It is fabricated at Taiwan Semiconductor, which is one of the world's large major fab houses.”
Michael James Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 18:23 Designing an AI Supercomputer // Michael James, Cerebras (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Designing an AI Supercomputer // Michael James, Cerebras (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC) Feb 20, 2020 16m
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