OpenAI at one point considered acquiring Cerabras, an AI chip manufacturer that is going public, according to new legal filings.
Elon Musk's ongoing lawsuit against OpenAI includes how OpenAI considered acquiring Cerebras around 2017, a year after Cerebras was founded and just a few years after OpenAI began operations. Contains new evidence to explain why.
In an email to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Musk, Ilya Satskever, one of OpenAI's co-founders and former chief scientist, said that he would sell Cerebra through Musk's EV company, Tesla, in an email to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Musk. The idea of acquiring the company was floated. At the time, Musk was financially involved in OpenAI and had some influence over its direction.
“If we decide to acquire Cerebra, I strongly believe it will be done through Tesla,” Sutskever wrote in September 2017. Specifically, Tesla has a duty to its shareholders to maximize shareholder returns, and there are concerns that this may not align with OpenAI's mission. Therefore, the overall results may not be optimal for OpenAI. ”
In an email dated July 2017 that Mr. Sutskever sent to Mr. Musk and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman (currently the company's president), Mr. Sutskever stated that he wanted to “negotiate the terms of the merger with Cerebras” and ” It mentions Cerebra-related topics such as “further due diligence with Cerebra.”
Although the reasons for this are not clear from the exhibit, the merger agreement would ultimately fail. And OpenAI will end up shelving its chip ambitions for years.
Sunnyvale, California-based Cerebras builds custom hardware to run and train AI models, and its chips are faster and more efficient than Nvidia's flagship products for AI workloads. I claim that.
Cerebras, which has raised $715 million in venture capital, is reportedly looking to nearly double its $4 billion valuation through an IPO. However, it faces major challenges. A single Abu Dhabi company, G42, accounted for 87% of Cerebra's revenue in the first half of 2024, and U.S. lawmakers have expressed concerns about the G42's historic relationship with China. Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman also has a checkered past, pleading guilty to evading accounting controls while vice president of publicly traded Riverstone Networks.
If the acquisition had gone through, both companies might have benefited. While Cerebras may have avoided a difficult path to an IPO, OpenAI may have had critical resources in the race to develop its own chips.
OpenAI has long sought to reduce dependence on Nvidia, which has a large share of the market for AI-optimized chips. OpenAI is late to the in-house chip game, but Google and Amazon Web Services have long offered chips designed for AI workloads that reduce the cost of training, fine-tuning, and running models. We are under such pressure. Having your own chip could be one way to achieve the needed savings.
At one point, OpenAI wanted to establish a network of factories for making chips and was considering acquisitions. However, the company has reportedly abandoned these plans, aggressively ramping up its team of chip designers and engineers, and collaborating with semiconductor companies Broadcom and TSMC to develop AI chips to run the models. He decided to develop it. This could happen as early as 2026.