erebras Systems, a company dedicated to accelerating artificial intelligence (AI) compute, today announced it has been selected as a winner of Fast Company’s 2020 World Changing Ideas Awards, which honor the businesses, policies, projects, and concepts that are actively engaged and deeply committed to flattening the curve when it comes to the climate crisis, social injustice, or economic inequality. The Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine (WSE), the first and only trillion transistor processor, and the Cerebras CS-1, the industry’s fastest AI computer, were selected as honorable mentions in Fast Company’s Best World Changing Ideas North America category. The CS-1 is comprised of three technologies: the WSE, which is the compute engine, the CS-1 system, which delivers power, cooling and data to the WSE, and the Cerebras software platform, which makes the solution quick to deploy and easy to use. These technologies combine to make the CS-1 the highest performing AI accelerator ever built, allowing AI researchers to use their existing software models without modification.
“Our vision at Cerebras is to push the boundaries of AI technologies and change the way we work, live and play,” said Andrew Feldman, CEO and co-founder, Cerebras Systems. “We are honored to have our technology selected as a Best World Changing Idea by Fast Company. By eliminating the primary impediment to the advancement of AI — reducing the time it takes to train models from months to minutes, from weeks to seconds—the CS-1 reduces the cost of curiosity.”
Now in its fourth year, the World Changing Ideas Awards showcase 26 winners, more than 200 finalists, and more than 500 honorable mentions—with Health and Wellness, Corporate Social Responsibility, and AI and Data among the most popular categories. A panel of eminent judges selected winners and finalists from a pool of more than 3,000 entries across transportation, education, food, politics, technology, and more. The 2020 awards feature entries from across the globe, from Vancouver to Singapore to Tel Aviv.
Illustrating how some of the world’s most inventive entrepreneurs and companies are addressing grave global challenges, Fast Company’s May/June issue celebrates, among others, an electric engine for airplanes that eliminates emissions from flights—and expensive fuel from the tricky financial calculus of the airline industry; a solar-powered refrigerator that finally frees people in remote villages from daily treks to distant markets, transforming the economics of those households; an online marketplace that connects food companies with farms to buy ugly and surplus produce to fight waste; and an initiative to offset all of the carbon costs of shipping, creating a new model for e-commerce sustainability.
“There seems no better time to recognize organizations that are using their ingenuity, resources, and, in some cases, their scale to tackle society’s biggest problems,” says Stephanie Mehta, editor-in-chief of Fast Company. “Our journalists, under the leadership of senior editor Morgan Clendaniel, have uncovered some of the smartest and most inspiring projects of the year.”
For more information about WSE and CS-1, please visit www.cerebras.net.
About Cerebras Systems
Cerebras Systems is a team of pioneering computer architects, computer scientists, deep learning researchers, and engineers of all types. We have come together to build a new class of computer to accelerate artificial intelligence work by three orders of magnitude beyond the current state of the art. The first announced element of the Cerebras solution is the Wafer Scale Engine (WSE). The WSE is the largest chip ever built. It contains 1.2 trillion transistors and covers more than 46,225 square millimeters of silicon. The largest graphics processor on the market has 21.1 billion transistors and covers 815 square millimeters. In artificial intelligence work, large chips process information more quickly producing answers in less time. As a result, neural networks that in the past took months to train, can train in minutes on the Cerebras WSE.
About the World Changing Ideas Awards
World Changing Ideas is one of Fast Company’s major annual awards programs and is focused on social good, seeking to elevate finished products and brave concepts that make the world better. A panel of judges from across sectors choose winners, finalists, and honorable mentions based on feasibility and the potential for impact. With a goal of awarding ingenuity and fostering innovation, Fast Company draws attention to ideas with great potential and helps them expand their reach to inspire more people to start working on solving the problems that affect us all.
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