OpenAI was considering whether to buy AI accelerator developer Cerebras with the participation of Tesla

The OpenAI company, according to the TechCrunch resource, was studying the possibility of acquiring the American startup Cerebras Systems, specializing in the development of AI accelerators. Such information was revealed as part of the lawsuit brought by Elon Musk against OpenAI.

Musk is one of the founders of OpenAI; he left the company in 2018. In early August of this year, Musk sued OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, accusing them of violation of rights and interests, as well as misrepresentation.

Image source: Cerebras

In an email to Altman and Musk, Ilya Sutskever, one of OpenAI’s co-founders and the company’s former chief scientist, is now reported to have discussed the idea of ​​buying Cerebras through Tesla. In another letter from July 2017, Sutskever addressed a number of issues related to Cerebras, such as negotiations over the terms of the merger and due diligence on Cerebras’ financial condition.

«If we decide to buy Cerebras, I firmly believe it will be through Tesla. But why do it this way when we could do the deal from within OpenAI? “In particular, it is troubling that Tesla has an obligation to shareholders to maximize their return, which is inconsistent with OpenAI’s mission,” Sutzkever wrote.

Cerebras creates AI super accelerators the size of an entire silicon wafer. The startup’s flagship product is the third generation Wafer Scale Engine (WSE-3). This giant product contains 4 trillion transistors, 900 thousand cores and 44 GB of SRAM memory. It was assumed that the merger with OpenAI would be beneficial to both parties. In particular, Cerebras would avoid the difficult path associated with an IPO, while OpenAI would be able to obtain powerful hardware accelerators for resource-intensive AI tasks. However, the deal ultimately failed, although the reasons for the collapse of negotiations were not disclosed.