Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More. Cerebras Systems and Perplexity AI are joining forces to challenge the dominance of conventional search engines, announcing a partnership that promises to deliver near-instantaneous AI-powered search results at speeds previously thought impossible.The collaboration, announced today in an exclusive VentureBeat report, centers on Perplexity’s new Sonar model, which runs on Cerebras’s specialized AI chips at 1,200 tokens per second—making it one of the fastest AI search systems available. Built on Meta’s Llama 3.3 70B foundation, Sonar represents a significant bet that users will embrace AI-first search experiences if they’re fast enough.“Our partnership with Cerebras has been instrumental in bringing Sonar to life,” said Denis Yarats, Perplexity’s CTO, in a statement. “Cerebras’s cutting-edge AI inference infrastructure has enabled us to achieve unprecedented speeds and efficiency.”AI search just got faster—and Big Tech should pay attentionThe timing is notable, coming just days after Cerebras made headlines with its DeepSeek implementation, which demonstrated speeds 57 times faster than traditional GPU-based solutions. The company appears to be leveraging this momentum to establish itself as the go-to provider for high-speed AI inference.According to Perplexity’s internal testing, Sonar outperforms both GPT-4o mini and Claude 3.5 Haiku “by a substantial margin” in user satisfaction metrics, while matching or exceeding more expensive models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More. Cerebras Systems announced today it will host DeepSeek’s breakthrough R1 artificial intelligence model on U.S. servers, promising speeds up to 57 times faster than GPU-based solutions while keeping sensitive data within American borders. The move comes amid growing concerns about China’s rapid AI advancement and data privacy.The AI chip startup will deploy a 70-billion-parameter version of DeepSeek-R1 running on its proprietary wafer-scale hardware, delivering 1,600 tokens per second — a dramatic improvement over traditional GPU implementations that have struggled with newer “reasoning” AI models.Response times for various AI platforms, measured in seconds to first token generation. Cerebras leads with the lowest latency at 0.18 seconds, while Amazon’s platform takes nearly a full second to respond