Davis Wilson:

Red Hot CBRS IPO

“Nvidia killer.” That’s the phrase suddenly getting attached to Cerebras Systems after one of the wildest IPO debuts we’ve seen in years.

Yesterday, the company priced its IPO at $185 per share. Then the stock opened around $350. Demand reportedly exceeded available shares 20-to-1. In other words, investors desperately wanted in.

Whereas Nvidia builds chips roughly the size of a Post-it note, Cerebras builds chips roughly the size of a dinner plate. This size difference is the key to Cerebras’ entire strategy.

Normally, AI systems rely on thousands of smaller chips working together at the same time. These chips constantly need to communicate with one another through networking systems called “interconnects.” But as AI models get larger and more complex, all that communication starts creating traffic jams.

Cerebras is trying to eliminate that problem. Instead of connecting thousands of smaller chips together, the company builds giant chips called Wafer-Scale Engines. This dramatically reduces the amount of data bouncing around between separate processors.

In other words, Cerebras may absolutely become an important AI infrastructure company. But investors should probably expect extreme volatility from here.

Personally, I’m not chasing the stock after a near-doubling right out of the gate. But I am putting Cerebras firmly on my watchlist.

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Greg Guenthner:

Man Says Claude Helped Him Recover $400,000 Worth of Bitcoin Locked in Wallet for Over a Decade

Yesterday was “the best day of my life” for anonymous X user “Cprkrn,” who said Claude helped him recover 5 bitcoin stuck for 11 years in a Blockchain wallet, encrypted with a forgotten second password. He bought the bitcoin for “between $200 and $300,” and it’s now worth roughly $400,000.

In an X thread that has now gone viral, Cprkrn shared a post from August 8, 2023, with Blockchain data showing the wallet hadn’t had any transactions since April 2015. Arkham data shows the funds were sent to a hot wallet at Hyperunit yesterday.

“Locked out 11+ years because I got stoned and changed the password,” he posted.

Sherwood News could not independently verify he is the owner of the wallet, as Cprkrn didn’t want to send a bitcoin transaction as proof. The timing of his posts and the transactions on the blockchain do correspond with Cprkrn’s narrative.

It's fair to say that Claude did not “crack” the bitcoin wallet per se, but helped Cprkrn find the old wallet backup file on his computer. In other words, don’t worry about Q-day-level threats to cryptography yet.

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Enrique Abeyta:

Last Time an El Niño Was This Bad, It Killed 50 Million People

As if oil shortages, perpetual wars, and the existential angst of AI weren’t stressful enough, there’s an El Niño brewing – and it’s looking like it’ll be one of the most severe in over a century.

According to numerous weather models, this year’s El Niño – a prolonged climate event featuring unusually warm temperatures, which pops up every couple of years – could easily be the most severe we’ve ever experienced in the modern age.

This year’s warm spell could supercharge ocean temperatures by as much as 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit, the Wall Street Journal reports, resulting in widespread droughts for some, floods for others, and perhaps most chillingly, chaos for global food supplies.

To find a historical equivalent, scientists have had to reach all the way back to 1877, when a merciless El Niño unleashed death on a scale few events can rival. Per the WSJ, the catastrophe fueled ongoing droughts, culminating in a global famine that killed at least 50 million people, though some estimates peg the loss of life at an even more horrifying 60 million – around 3% of the total population on Earth at the time.

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