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Meta introduced at this time a partnership with Cerebras Programs to energy its new Llama API, providing builders entry to inference speeds as much as 18 instances quicker than conventional GPU-based options.
The announcement, made at Meta’s inaugural LlamaCon developer convention in Menlo Park, positions the corporate to compete instantly with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google within the quickly rising AI inference service market, the place builders buy tokens by the billions to energy their functions.
“Meta has chosen Cerebras to collaborate to ship the ultra-fast inference that they should serve builders by their new Llama API,” stated Julie Shin Choi, chief advertising and marketing officer at Cerebras, throughout a press briefing. “We at Cerebras are actually, actually excited to announce our first CSP hyperscaler partnership to ship ultra-fast inference to all builders.”
The partnership marks Meta’s formal entry into the enterprise of promoting AI computation, remodeling its fashionable open-source Llama fashions right into a business service. Whereas Meta’s Llama fashions have accrued over one billion downloads, till now the corporate had not supplied a first-party cloud infrastructure for builders to construct functions with them.
“That is very thrilling, even with out speaking about Cerebras particularly,” stated James Wang, a senior government at Cerebras. “OpenAI, Anthropic, Google — they’ve constructed a complete new AI enterprise from scratch, which is the AI inference enterprise. Builders who’re constructing AI apps will purchase tokens by the tens of millions, by the billions typically. And these are similar to the brand new compute directions that folks have to construct AI functions.”
Breaking the pace barrier: How Cerebras supercharges Llama fashions
What units Meta’s providing aside is the dramatic pace enhance supplied by Cerebras’ specialised AI chips. The Cerebras system delivers over 2,600 tokens per second for Llama 4 Scout, in comparison with roughly 130 tokens per second for ChatGPT and round 25 tokens per second for DeepSeek, based on benchmarks from Synthetic Evaluation.
“In case you simply examine on API-to-API foundation, Gemini and GPT, they’re all nice fashions, however all of them run at GPU speeds, which is roughly about 100 tokens per second,” Wang defined. “And 100 tokens per second is okay for chat, but it surely’s very gradual for reasoning. It’s very gradual for brokers. And individuals are battling that at this time.”
This pace benefit allows solely new classes of functions that had been beforehand impractical, together with real-time brokers, conversational low-latency voice programs, interactive code era, and on the spot multi-step reasoning — all of which require chaining a number of massive language mannequin calls that may now be accomplished in seconds relatively than minutes.
The Llama API represents a big shift in Meta’s AI technique, transitioning from primarily being a mannequin supplier to turning into a full-service AI infrastructure firm. By providing an API service, Meta is making a income stream from its AI investments whereas sustaining its dedication to open fashions.
“Meta is now within the enterprise of promoting tokens, and it’s nice for the American sort of AI ecosystem,” Wang famous throughout the press convention. “They create rather a lot to the desk.”
The API will supply instruments for fine-tuning and analysis, beginning with Llama 3.3 8B mannequin, permitting builders to generate information, prepare on it, and check the standard of their customized fashions. Meta emphasizes that it received’t use buyer information to coach its personal fashions, and fashions constructed utilizing the Llama API could be transferred to different hosts—a transparent differentiation from some opponents’ extra closed approaches.
Cerebras will energy Meta’s new service by its community of knowledge facilities positioned all through North America, together with services in Dallas, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Montreal, and California.
“All of our information facilities that serve inference are in North America presently,” Choi defined. “We can be serving Meta with the complete capability of Cerebras. The workload can be balanced throughout all of those totally different information facilities.”
The enterprise association follows what Choi described as “the traditional compute supplier to a hyperscaler” mannequin, just like how Nvidia supplies {hardware} to main cloud suppliers. “They’re reserving blocks of our compute that they’ll serve their developer inhabitants,” she stated.
Past Cerebras, Meta has additionally introduced a partnership with Groq to supply quick inference choices, giving builders a number of high-performance alternate options past conventional GPU-based inference.
Meta’s entry into the inference API market with superior efficiency metrics might doubtlessly disrupt the established order dominated by OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. By combining the recognition of its open-source fashions with dramatically quicker inference capabilities, Meta is positioning itself as a formidable competitor within the business AI house.
“Meta is in a singular place with 3 billion customers, hyper-scale datacenters, and an enormous developer ecosystem,” based on Cerebras’ presentation supplies. The mixing of Cerebras know-how “helps Meta leapfrog OpenAI and Google in efficiency by roughly 20x.”
For Cerebras, this partnership represents a significant milestone and validation of its specialised AI {hardware} strategy. “We’ve been constructing this wafer-scale engine for years, and we all the time knew that the know-how’s first price, however in the end it has to finish up as a part of another person’s hyperscale cloud. That was the ultimate goal from a business technique perspective, and we’ve lastly reached that milestone,” Wang stated.
The Llama API is at the moment accessible as a restricted preview, with Meta planning a broader rollout within the coming weeks and months. Builders keen on accessing the ultra-fast Llama 4 inference can request early entry by deciding on Cerebras from the mannequin choices inside the Llama API.
“In case you think about a developer who doesn’t know something about Cerebras as a result of we’re a comparatively small firm, they’ll simply click on two buttons on Meta’s customary software program SDK, generate an API key, choose the Cerebras flag, after which rapidly, their tokens are being processed on an enormous wafer-scale engine,” Wang defined. “That sort of having us be on the again finish of Meta’s complete developer ecosystem is simply great for us.”
Meta’s selection of specialised silicon alerts one thing profound: within the subsequent section of AI, it’s not simply what your fashions know, however how shortly they’ll assume it. In that future, pace isn’t only a function—it’s the entire level.
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