🇺🇸Jensen Huang is out there living his best life, dancing at the NVIDIA all-employee celebration event in Taipei, Taiwan
You'd never guess he's the CEO 😂
This week, @cerebras IPO'd in one of the largest technology IPOs in history.
We didn't get here alone.
There are many people and companies to thank.
To our families. It is not easy to be married to someone trying to build a company. The hours are long and so are the years. Their patience knew no bounds.
To our team. They bet big chunks of their careers on 5 guys who said we could solve a problem nobody had solved in 75 years.
There were 18 months between 2017 and 2019 when we couldn't make a single chip work. We were burning $8M a month. Every six weeks we'd sit with our board and say: not yet. Not yet. Not yet.
The team stayed steady. They solved problems nobody else could.
When our first wafer worked in August 2019, the technology was solved. But it was still 2019. OpenAI was nascent. There was no Anthropic. AI was still a parlor trick.
Then the models got good enough to be useful.
In some areas, necessary.
And when something becomes useful, speed is everything. Our business exploded.
To our early investors - @benchmark, @FoundationCap, @EclipseVentures, @coatuemgmt, @AltimeterCap and many more - whose support never wavered through years of challenges.
To TSMC, who agreed to work with us when we were a 40-person team with big ideas.
To our earliest customers - Argonne, Sandia, GSK - who bet on us when the product was raw and the roadmap unproven.
To Peng at G42, their Chairman, and the leadership of the UAE, who believed in us when many people were afraid.
And to many others not mentioned who contributed in ways large and small.
We say thank you.
Today starts a new chapter for us.
But it is still, just the beginning.
Photo Credit: @Nasdaq / Vanja Savic
Krishna Rao is the CFO of Anthropic, and this is his first podcast appearance.
He joined the company two years ago when run-rate revenue was about $250M. Today it is $30B. He has helped raise ~$75B and is responsible for the procurement and allocation of compute.
I feel lucky we get to hear what it is like to sit inside a company this consequential at a moment this pivotal.
We discuss:
- The cone of uncertainty
- How he allocates compute across Trainium, TPUs, and GPUs
- What investors misunderstand about model companies
- Why the returns to frontier intelligence keep rising
- Platform vs application and where Anthropic builds its own products
- How Anthropic uses Claude internally
I have asked my closing question about the kindest thing more than 500 times. Krishna's answer is one I have never heard before.
Enjoy!
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
2:38 The Compute Canvas
6:51 The "Cone of Uncertainty"
11:58 Why the Returns to Frontier Intelligence Are So High
16:45 Recursive Self-Improvement
20:20 Scaling Laws
23:30 Sourcing $100 Billion in Compute
28:05 Platform vs. Application Strategy
32:52 Pricing Dynamics
38:48 How Anthropic’s Finance Team Uses Claude
43:24 Raising Capital & Overcoming Investor Skepticism
52:32 Public Perception, Risks, and Government Regulation
57:25 Mythos Release
1:12:33 What Could Derail the AI Revolution?
1:13:47 Biotech and Healthcare
1:15:31 The Kindest Thing
Jason Cammisa on @Tesla giving him access to the Model S Signature:
"I said I need some time with Lars (VP of Vehicle Engineering). And they said: "we'll do one better. Let's get Lars and Franz and we'll send 45 minutes together." It ended up being 3 hours; These are the coolest guys you'll meet. They are total car, data and engineering nerds."
(via The Carmudgeon Show). Full podcast linked below: