The Mayo Clinic has one of the world’s most extensive and valuable health data sets. AI can now transform that treasure trove into better health outcomes and scientific understanding, and Cerebras has been selected to help.
As we noted last Fall, Cerebras is one of the few AI hardware startups to land large customers and is on target for something close to a billion dollars in revenue. While the company’s Wafer Scale Engine made it famous, its passion and capacity for solving complex problems is becoming an equally important differentiator. Cerebras’ AI expertise was critical to the Mayo Clinic as it decided to select Cerebras as its lead partner in developing large language models (LLMs) for medical applications.
What Did Cerebras Announce?
Scraping the internet for training models such as OpenAI GPT-4 can create impressive AIs. Still, such models lack the specific scientific data that resides inside institutional vaults such as those found in the Mayo Clinic. Consequently, Mayo and others must train new models using internal, confidential, multi-modal data from patient diagnostics, treatments, outcomes, imaging, and molecular research.
The first deliverable of the partnership is a Rheumatoid Arthritis diagnostic model, which will combine data from patient records, DNA and drug molecules to help match RA patients with the best therapeutics to manage their disease. Mayo and Cerebras plan to develop a similar model for pancreatic cancer, the fourth leading cause of cancer death in both men and women, taking nearly a half million lives globally in 2020.
“Mayo Clinic selected Cerebras as its first generative AI collaborator for its large-scale, domain-specific AI expertise to accelerate breakthrough insights for the benefit of patients,” said Matthew Callstrom, MD, PhD, of the Mayo Clinic.
Details of the agreement were not disclosed regarding the number of CS-2s and whether this is cloud, on-prem, or both (probably the latter). However, Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman described the arrangement as multi-year and “many, many millions of dollars.”
Conclusions
Cerebras has another notch in its ever-growing success belt. It has now positioned itself in a leadership role in accelerating AI in health care and pharmaceuticals, adding to its existing projects with Glaxo Smith Klein and M42. This design win reinforces our viewpoint that Cerebras will emerge as one of the few highly successful data center AI hardware startups. They have the gear, the software, and the expertise needed to attract enterprises looking for the best help they can find to build their specific AI solutions.
Disclosures: This article expresses the opinions of the author and is not to be taken as advice to purchase from or invest in the companies mentioned. My firm, Cambrian-AI Research, is fortunate to have many semiconductor firms as our clients, including BrainChip, Cadence, Cerebras Systems, Esperanto, IBM, Intel, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Graphcore, SImA,ai, Synopsys, Tenstorrent, Ventana Microsystems, and scores of investors. We have no investment positions in any of the companies mentioned in this article. For more information, please visit our website at https://cambrian-AI.com.
