Cerebras CEO Pushes Back on AI Doomsday Warnings and Predicts Home AI Assistants

Feldman quipped that “some of the leaders in the AI world maybe shouldn’t be allowed to talk in public,” referring to negativity around dangers such as models breaking containment and insiders debating the percentage chance that AI may kill all of humanity by the end of the decade. He pointed to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who was recently parodied on Saturday Night Live in a skit where the fictional character summed up the discourse by saying, “We do not condone what we are doing.”

Feldman said AI leaders should spend more time telling people that the technology could lead to a world where your grandkids will “never meet anybody who dies of cancer,” even if they have concerns about AI risks. He acknowledged a vested interest in AI’s success: Cerebras customers include OpenAI, Block, Figma, GSK, and Lovable. Still, he framed the tradeoff between risk and reward as unavoidable. “I don’t think there are powerful technologies that don’t come with the challenge of ‘what happens when powerful technologies are in the hands of bad people?’ I think you can’t make one and not have the other,” Feldman said. “I think what we have to say is that this technology is powerful,” he added. “We have to be thoughtful about it. We have to regulate it reasonably.”

He also tied some negative sentiment around AI to how the data center industry has handled new buildouts driven by AI demand. “As an industry, we weren’t super good for the past few years at working with local communities, particularly in the U.S. We — the industry — didn’t do what others have done in the power industry in oil and gas. They didn’t work with the community. They didn’t engage the community as they should have, and that was a problem,” Feldman said. He compared NIMBYism in the U.S. with markets such as Brazil, Canada, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Mexico, and Sweden, which he said are encouraging companies to build data centers.

Feldman said he was not concerned that efficiency improvements would reduce demand for Cerebras chips or competing products from Nvidia. “We can do our job as hardware vendors to make our compute more efficient, and then the model makers can do improved work in making their models more efficient to achieve the same goals. All of this has to come together to make meaningful strides forward,” he said.

On consumer AI, Feldman said a future in which everyone has an AI appliance at home is not far away. He pointed to the advances in consumer AI agents, like Meta’s Muse and Instinct, the startup now valued at $10 billion, as examples of how AI is finding its footing with everyday users. He predicted personal AI assistants that run locally, with some work done on device and some in the cloud, similar to a cell phone. Those assistants will get to know users, have a security perimeter, and have access to credit cards to buy things for them, he said. “I think they will make a meaningful impact in making our lives better.”

Feldman said he is already a personal AI user, relying on “a collection of agents” to sweep his calendar and pull up information about people he is going to have calls with. He said he is most excited about new possibilities that were not possible before, but he is leaving it to other founders to identify them. “One of the reasons I love being in infrastructure is because I don’t need the consumer-facing idea … I like building the platforms that other people’s ideas take flight on,” he said.