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Discussion (82 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
This was also interesting: "CS-4 delivers more than 1,000 tokens per second on models exceeding 10 trillion parameters." Was it known that there were 10 trillion parameter models in use?
I think the frontier providers keep the size of their models carefully hidden.
Oops did they just out GPT-5.6 sol’s parameter count?
if you have the money as an "individual user" to purchase one of their racks... save your money and retire.
* Actually they sent out an email claiming they already have it, but I don't seem to have access, they're promising to release it to the "shared tier" any day now.
Now that this hypothetical person has retired, what are they gonna do all day? Just sit on the beach and drink Mai Tais? If that's what they wanna do, sure, but nerds gonna nerd, and if I had that kind of money to retire on, I'd totally buy some ridiculously expensive AI box for fun.
Can you imagine something radiating that much energy into a space in your home?
This is far beyond the practical maximums of like 10 to 15kW per 44U cabinet front to rear air cooling for 'regular' rackmount server stuff.
All or a vast majority of of the cerebras manufacturing capacity was going to a few companies that aren't publicly available inference providers on openrouter, for their own internal use.
or
The asking price of the S-3, no matter how speedy it might be, for small/medium size customers made it economically prohibitive to purchase and use to sell public inference vs. buying more common nvidia b200 or whatever.
imo the issue is that most openrouter demand is inauthentic activity (things that anthropic and openai models will refuse to do like pretend to not be bots when interacting with humans)
> CS-4 delivers more than 1,000 tokens per second on models exceeding 10 trillion parameters
Wow!
It'll all be as cheap as DeepSeek was before the price hike. And, it'll become more and more realistic to run near-frontier intelligence on personal devices.
I'm honestly baffled they were not acquired by somebody else (sorry AMD).
There exist other AI accelerators (TPUs, ASICs) that perfectly exceed the throughput that LLMs need to scale as well. But the true solution is more software optimizations. There's a tiny handful of them but more needs to be discovered so that we can reduce building hundreds of more data centers as the alternatives mature.
As better software becomes more useful for the alternative AI hardware for developers with LLMs running efficiently you then would have more choices of hardware to run your LLMs on rather than just only GPUs.
They're typically not built where you want housing, and the buildings are distinctly the wrong shape.
If you can't use the power infrastructure profitably my next thought would be warehousing.
But also... we've seen a pretty continually increasing demand for compute. Even if AI busts a bit (or becomes a bit more efficient) I bet most data centres stay data centres, just less profitable ones.
> built on both the insurmountable trillions of debt, and the assumption that only GPUs are all we need to continue scaling.
Insurmountable according to whom? And who assume that only GPUs are all we need to continue scaling? Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and OpenAI, all have or plan custom non-GPU AI chips. Do they plan to use them not for scaling?
GPUs really aren't that great for AI. They just happen to be the best chips we have in mass production right now for this work load, and it takes time to field new designs. Basically every chip engineer on the planet is working on this right now.
A rough analogy would be if the first generation of ISP's spent billions on dial-up exchanges, when fibre could be invented next year.
In the scenario, engineering everything becomes so easy - so why not optimize everything? every component, every product, every system?
And maybe llm's could invent. So even more to simulate. And simulation is inherently compute-heavy.
So unless there are some other bottlenecks, we'll use a lot of simulation servers.
If AI tends to be something used mainly in ideation and development, which is how a lot of people use it today, then once consumer hardware gets good enough you could see a bunch of the current data centre workloads move onto consumer devices.
But if AI starts being used more in repeatable, operational workloads I think it makes sense to have significant cloud infrastructure for it. TBH I haven't seen much of this, and I've been skeptical about people using agents for much of anything when it can be done with just software. But we are starting to see more of this kind of workload, like the taggable Claude in your slack etc that people seem to really love.
In that 5+ year timeline, the compute per watt could change by three orders of magnitude.
GPUs are to LLMs what CPUs are to gaming — not a good fit.
Did nobody proofread this?
It’s still incredibly obvious.
What's the point of 1000tok/s if you have to do prefill on every agentic turn which at 100k depth would make it 1.5 min latency every turn?
44GB on-chip-sram * 3 chips. Per chip: 43.2 PB/s memory access + 53.5 PB/s on-chip fabric bandwidth + 2.4 Tbits/s "IO" bandwidth (I think that means their RoCE v2 RDMA over Ethernet interface).
I suspect there might be a certain amount of customization for how much RAM they attach when you order it.
I understand that Cerebras has competition, but this bodes even more poorly for Nvidia for inference. Nvidia may still have a role to play for training, however.
GLM 4.7 (December 2025) not 5 (Feb) 5.1 (April) or 5.2 (June). 5.3 (4 days ago) is, to be fair, not open weights yet... but there's a lot since 4.7.
Kimi K2.7 (April) not K2.7-code (June) or K3 (July).
Gemma 4 (April), Llama (April), and gpt-oss (August 2025) are up to date, but old (for models).
Meanwhile the closed source GPT 5.6 sol is up to date (June)...
Should potential purchasers take away from this that they're not going to be able to run recent models unless they front the cost of developing software or something?
But even an enterprise is going to care about the difference between "we can run the model we want with support from the manufacturer" and "we have to purchase the product, and then spend another 6 figure sum having developers port a recent model to the product to use it".
A single AI server with a mere 8 GPUs from Nvidia is already mid 6 digits. A rack system from Nvidia is mid 7 digits.
There’s some info out there that suggests the CS1 had an 8 digits price tag, so it wouldn’t be surprising to see that here.