Cerebras Systems CEO and co-founder Andrew Feldman believes we’re nearing a future where everyone will have an AI appliance in their own home.
Speaking on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 on Tuesday, the chipmaker executive answered a question about what would need to happen for AI to become a home appliance, saying, “Actually, I don’t think that’s very far away.”
He pointed to the advances in consumer AI agents, like Meta’s Muse and Instinct, the startup now valued at $10 billion, as examples of how AI is finding its footing with everyday users.
As for home AI? He predicts that we’ll have personal AI assistants that run locally.
“Just like your cell phone, they’ll do some work on device and some work going back to the cloud,” Feldman explained. “But I think they will get to know you very well, and you will have a security perimeter around them. And they will certainly have access to credit cards and be able to buy things for you,” he continued. “I think they will make a meaningful impact in making our lives better.”
Of course, for an AI chipmaker, the vision of a home AI appliance, or at least widespread consumer adoption of agentic technology, is certainly appealing.
But Feldman isn’t just working on the hardware infrastructure; he’s a personal AI user himself, saying that he now uses “a collection of agents” to sweep his calendar, pull up information about the people he’s going to have a call with, and more. While AI is already doing many of the things we used to do manually, Feldman is most excited about the new possibilities — things that weren’t possible before.
He’s leaving it up to other founders to figure out what those might be, though.
“One of the reasons I love being in infrastructure is because I don’t need the consumer-facing idea … I like building the platforms that other people’s ideas take flight on,” he said.
Cerebras Systems CEO and co-founder Andrew Feldman thinks the AI doomer narrative isn’t doing the industry any favors. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, the AI chipmaker exec quipped that “some of the leaders in the AI world maybe shouldn’t be allowed to talk in public.”
He’s referencing the negativity now spreading around the dangers of AI, from models breaking containment to AI insiders debating the percentage chance that AI may kill all of humanity by the end of the decade. The argument has become so mainstream that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei was recently parodied in a skit on “Saturday Night Live,” where the fictional character summed up the discourse, saying, “We do not condone what we are doing.”
Feldman, however, thinks the promise and potential that go hand in hand with AI developments are getting overlooked. He thinks AI leaders should spend more time telling people that AI could lead to a world where your grandkids will “never meet anybody who dies of cancer,” for instance, even if they have concerns about AI risks.
Clearly, Feldman has a vested interest in AI being successful, as the company’s customers include big names working with the technology, like OpenAI, Block, Figma, pharmaceutical giant GSK, and Lovable.
However, he’s pragmatic about weighing the trade-offs between risk and reward.
“I don’t think there are powerful technologies that don’t come with the challenge of ‘what happens when powerful technologies are in the hands of bad people?’ I think you can’t make one and not have the other,” Feldman said during his interview at Disrupt.
“I think what we have to say is that this technology is powerful,” he added. “We have to be thoughtful about it. We have to regulate it reasonably,” he added.
The chipmaker CEO also suggested that some of the negativity around AI has to do with how the data center industry has approached the new buildouts created by AI demand.
“As an industry, we weren’t super good for the past few years at working with local communities, particularly in the U.S. We — the industry — didn’t do what others have done in the power industry in oil and gas. They didn’t work with the community. They didn’t engage the community as they should have, and that was a problem,” Feldman said.
He compared the NIMBY-ism — “not in my backyard!” — of what’s going on in the U.S. with other countries, naming Brazil, Canada, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Mexico, and Sweden as markets where they’re encouraging companies to build data centers.
Feldman also wasn’t concerned that efficiency improvements would create less demand for his chips, or those from other companies competing with Nvidia, as Cerebras is.
“We can do our job as hardware vendors to make our compute more efficient, and then the model makers can do improved work in making their models more efficient to achieve the same goals. All of this has to come together to make meaningful strides forward,” he noted.
