ANDY HOCK
CEREBRAS SYSTEMS
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The Research and Applied AI Summit (RAAIS) is a community for entrepreneurs and researchers who accelerate the science and applications of AI technology. We’ve been running for 6 years now and have hosted over fifty entrepreneurs and academics who have built billion-dollar companies and published foundational papers that drive the AI field forward.
In the lead up to our 6th annual event that will be broadcast live online on the 26th June 2020, we’re running a series of speaker profiles highlighting what you can expect to learn on the day!
Two distinct eras of compute usage in training AI systems
It’s no secret in the industry that the compute requirements for training modern AI systems are going up and to the right. A recent analysis showed there’s two distinct eras in timeline of AI training compute requirements. The first is pre-2012, i.e. pre/early-deep learning (Belief Networks, BiLSTMs, RNNs), and the second is post-2013, i.e. the age of modern deep learning (ResNet, BERT, AlphaGoZero). At the same time, there appears to be a concomitant reduction in algorithmic efficiency. That is to say, modern deep learning systems can achieve AlexNet performance with 44x less compute.
A new compute era requires a new computer
If AI R&D progress is indeed rate limited to a large degree by compute resources, there needs to be an effort to develop purpose-built processors for modern AI. One such company that is reimaging computer systems for the AI-first era is Los Altos-based Cerebras Systems. The company was founded by a team of industry veterans from SeaMicro (acq. AMD for $357M in 2012), which pioneered the development of energy-efficient, high-bandwidth microservers.
We’re excited to welcome Andy Hock, Head of Product at Cerebras to RAAIS 2020. Andy is responsible for the requirements and product strategy for Cerebras’ hardware, software, ML research, marketing. He works with engineering leadership to deliver on Cerebras' technology vision, built and manages a world-class product management team, leads early customer engagement and business development. This work recently culminated in the launch of the Cerebras CS-1, the world's most powerful AI compute system. The CS-1 delivers the performance of a cluster of traditional machines in a single server powered by Cerebras' massive 400,000 core wafer-scale processor, readily programmable with standard ML frameworks like TensorFlow. This machine enables AI research at previously-impossible speeds and scale.
Prior to Cerebras, Andy led Data and Analytics Product for the Terra Bella project at Google, using deep learning and AI to create useful data for maps and enterprise applications from satellite imagery. Before Google, Andy was a Senior Scientist and Senior Technical Program Manager at Arete Associates, where he led research for image processing algorithm development. He holds a PhD in Geophysics and Space Physics from UCLA and a BA in Astronomy-Physics from Colgate University.
We’re excited to be hosting Andy at RAAIS 2020, welcome!