Cerebras CTO on the inference frontier: from 4,000 toward 10,000 tokens per second
Latent Space · youtube · 2026-09-03
Latent Space interview with Cerebras co-founder and CTO Sean Lie
- Speed as capability: 100–200 tokens/s may soon feel like "batch mode"; CS4 already pushes inference beyond 4,400 TPS, CS5 targets 10,000 TPS on medium models, and frontier models can run at 5,000 TPS.
- Sold out: Cerebras is effectively sold out of current capacity.
- OpenAI partnership: OpenAI uses ultra-fast inference internally for incident response and critical research; Sean discusses OpenAI's Jalapeño chip, argues AI-first chip design will transform semiconductors, and sees CS5 + Jalapeño combining into a new inference stack.
- Architecture takes: He critiques Groq's SRAM approach at frontier scale, notes models designed around NVIDIA GPUs leave gains on the table for alternatives, and sees hardware-model co-design as the next big win.
- Disaggregation: Inference is splitting into prefill, decode, attention, and expert routing; future data centers may be designed as one giant computer. Memory bandwidth, 3D packaging, power, and cooling are the central bottlenecks.
- US–China: Chinese open models are rising alongside an increasingly independent Chinese AI hardware ecosystem.
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