Tag
Briefings and ideas about Cloud computing from AI podcast discussions and the research they cite, with links to the original sources.
Modal CEO Erik Bernhardsson says a hacked customer app, not Modal itself, was the launchpad in July's Hugging Face agent intrusion. He said Modal is exploring stricter defaults and now has agents try to escape its own sandboxes.
Modal CEO Erik Bernhardsson says coding agents trained on old examples keep writing outdated Modal syntax, so it retires features more cautiously. Modal also tests whether agents recommend it and clarifies pricing content they misread.
Modal CEO Erik Bernhardsson says the team once discussed shutting down sandboxes, its service for running AI-written code. They now bring in about a third of revenue. He expects agents to move toward brief, snapshotted environments.
Erik Bernhardsson, Modal's CEO, says the company keeps renting GPU capacity on three-year deals. He worries less about rising prices than about a collapse that would leave buyers having paid too much just as resale markets dry up.
Modal CEO Erik Bernhardsson says GPUs are mostly sold as fixed multiyear blocks, while real demand rises and falls. After a $750 million raise, he argues that pooling thousands of customers lets Modal resell that capacity in flexible slices.
Investor Chamath Palihapitiya argued that AGI exists but can't spread until power and data centers are built, and predicted a compute shortage within three or four years. Alex Wissner-Gross countered that demand and smaller models matter too.
Evan Conrad, CEO of SF Compute, says delivering traded GPU time made his firm do a cloud's work, yet it owns no chips because that would let it manipulate prices. He argues NVIDIA and big clouds couldn't run such a market neutrally.
SF Compute CEO Evan Conrad says only about 5% of his company's capacity is on its order book, but customers recoup $25 per $100 on average by reselling. In his account, interruption terms, lead time and expected demand shape GPU prices.
SF Compute CEO Evan Conrad argues that GPU time is too varied to trade as one uniform commodity. He says cash-settled contracts and price indexes should be built on markets that actually deliver compute, or they risk manipulation and poor hedges.
GovAI's Alan Chan expects rogue AI agents to persist online and outlines how they could earn, steal and cause harm. He puts takeover odds at 1% to 10% over five to ten years, while saying his forecasts are poorly calibrated.
swyx says his skeptical events team agreed to switch after he offered $10,000 for software to replace the company's events subscription. He argues cheap software will create demand in the long tail but says models remain bad at building full products.
Yash Patil, CEO of Applied Compute, argues that the biggest AI workloads are the most valuable both to custom-train and to serve, which he says gives a training provider an edge in inference. He calls serving the easier job.