Truly Serverless Infra for AI Engineers - with Erik Bernhardsson of Modal

Latent Space · Beginner ·🤖 AI Agents & Automation ·2y ago
Almost 12 years ago, while working at Spotify, Erik Bernhardsson built one of the first open source vector databases, Annoy, based on ANN search. He also built Luigi, one of the predecessors to Airflow, which helps data teams orchestrate and execute data-intensive and long-running jobs. Surprisingly, he didn’t start yet another vector database company, but instead in 2021 founded Modal, the “high-performance cloud for developers”. Full transcription + show notes: https://www.latent.space/p/modal 00:00:00 Introductions 00:02:08 Erik’s OSS work at Spotify: Annoy and Luigi 00:06:51 Starting Mo…
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Chapters (22)

Introductions
2:08 Erik’s OSS work at Spotify: Annoy and Luigi
6:51 Starting Modal
8:36 Vision for a “postmodern data stack”
11:56 Solving container cold start problems
14:13 Designing Modal’s Python SDK
16:50 Self-Revisioning Runtime
21:50 Truly Serverless Infrastructure
23:11 Beyond model inference
24:30 Tricks to maximize GPU utilization
29:28 Differences in AI and data science workloads
31:10 Modal vs Replicate vs Modular and lessons from Heroku’s “graduation problem”
38:03 Creating Erik’s clone “ErikBot”
42:09 Enabling massive parallelism across thousands of GPUs
44:23 The Modal Sandbox for agents
48:56 Thoughts on the AI Inference War
54:53 Erik’s best tweets
57:52 Why buying hardware is a waste of money
1:00:20 Erik’s competitive programming backgrounds
1:05:23 Why does Sweden have the best Counter Strike players?
1:06:18 Never owning a car or TV
1:06:47 Advice for infrastructure startups

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