The Ledger
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Liang: Nvidia GPUs are a commodity offering very limited cost advantage
“People forget, as much as NVIDIA costs, it's commodity. Right? Because what you offer is the same as what your neighbor offers and your differentiation is, I can save you a little bit of money because maybe I got a discount from NVIDIA, right? Or maybe I got a…”
Liang: SambaNova 10kW SN40 rack outperformed 140kW Nvidia GPU racks
“And so by the time we released SN-Forty a couple years ago, it became incredibly popular, because instead of a 130, a 140 kilowatt rack of NVIDIA GPU, we were outperforming them with a 10 kilowatt SN-Forty rack.”
Liang: Frontier AI models are heading toward 10 trillion parameters
“The new models are heading towards 10 trillion. Even the open source models are already one to two trillion parameter models, and so now you're starting to see these models getting very big because people are looking for accuracy, right?”
Liang: SambaNova serves 1.5T parameter models on one rack versus 10-20
“And so with sum it over, that minimum quantum is down to one rack. Right, where if you have other, other service providers, you just run, say, a DeepSeq model, which is now one and a half trillion parameters, just to run that, the minimum for some of the other…”
Liang: SambaNova announces $1B Series F at an $11B valuation
“We're announcing the first close, our Series F is a one billion dollar raise at eleven billion valuation.”
Rodrigo Liang: SambaNova closes $1B round at $11B valuation
“We just did the first close of a billion dollar fund raise at an eleven billion valuation.”
Liang: Demand will converge on the fastest, most accurate large models
“And so, as the cost of delivering fast goes down, you're going to see most people switch over to the fastest. And this is why I feel like, you know, the premium inference, which is large models, which equals the most accurate. The most accurate models and fast…”
Liang: Disaggregated inference across SambaNova, Nvidia, and Xeon is most efficient
“This aggregated inference that we talked about with NVIDIA chips, with Summono we've already used, with Xeons, Is just the most efficient way of actually deploying inference at scale”
Liang: AI inference chip deployments will dwarf training by orders of magnitude
“Because at scale, the number of chips deployed for inferencing will be orders of magnitude greater than whatever you're doing for training.”
Liang: SambaNova runs the largest models in full precision without quantizing
“We take the biggest models in the world and we run them in the original precision. We don't, you know, we don't quantize. We don't, you know, quantizing is, you know, you chop half the, you know, weights off. So, so we don't chop the model down. We just run or…”
Liang: SambaNova will not build proprietary cloud to compete with AWS
“Many of the chip companies have chosen to go build their own cloud. They compete with the AWSs of the world. We have chosen not to do that. What we decided that, you know, we want to do is focus our energy on creating technology that we can ship.”
Liang: Infrastructure repatriation to on-premises is actively occurring across enterprises
“Look, repatriation of infrastructure into on-prem is definitely happening, right? You saw this big shift. Everybody's got a cloud called cloud, you know, everything's in the cloud, and 20 years later, you still have companies just starting the migration to the…”
Liang: SambaNova has raised $2.5 billion in total capital
“We're two and a half billion dollars raised in the history of the company.”
Liang: AI compute economics are measured by token revenue generated per rack
“And this is the way we see most providers measuring. They purchase per rack, they operate per rack, and so they want to generate revenue per rack, and the revenue is generated per token, right? If I put a rack of hardware, I'm just seeing how many tokens I mig…”
Liang: SambaNova inference uses standard air-cooled racks and Ethernet
“Standard 19 inch rack, standard air cooling, no complicated liquid cooling retrofit in the data center. We're using standard Kubernetes, standard Red Hat Linux, standard Ethernet at the top for networking. We don't have to use all this kind of really expensive…”
Liang: SambaNova is deploying hardware in metropolitan cities for lower latency
“And so you're now seeing us coming in and saying, look, we're going to deploy the hardware where the users are in large metropolitan cities. Because that's where business is being run, and so latency is really important, so we're going to deploy that.”
Liang: SambaNova taped out six chips in seven years, tape-out seven next year
“We've taped out six chips in the last seven years, and we'll tape out seven for the next year.”
Liang: SambaNova builds 10-to-20 rack edge data centers inside shipping containers
“Because of somewhat of technology being as little as 10 kilowatts per rack, we can put them inside shipping containers. Right, so we build out these data centers, clusters of 10, 20 racks, inside the shipping containers that you see on these ships, right?”