High Signal Podcasts Evidence ledger
Method
Browse
← Back to evidence

Evidence receipt / evaluation

Published · transcript-backed

Erik Bernhardsson: evaluation

16 Feb 2024 Latent Space Truly Serverless Infra for AI Engineers - with Erik Bernhardsson of Modal

“And so I think there's a lot of different reasons why the technology wasn't well suited for back end. And I think the attitude at that time is often like, you know, like you had friction between the data team and the platform team, like, well, it works for the back end stuff, you know, why don't you just like, you know, make it work.”

— Erik Bernhardsson

Source trail

Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Erik Bernhardsson
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
evaluation
Recorded
16 Feb 2024
Publisher
Latent Space

Transcript context

…Not well for data teams because of burstiness. Yeah, for sure. So like burstiness is like one thing, right? Like, you know, like you often have this like fan out, you want to like apply some function over very large data sets. Another thing tends to be like hardware requirements, like you need like GPUs and like, I've seen this in many companies, like you go, you know, data scientists go to a platform team and they're like, can we add GPUs to the Kubernetes? And they're like, no, like, that's, you know, complex, and we're not gonna, so like just getting GPU access. And then like, I mean, I also like data code, like frankly, or like machine learning code like tends to be like, super annoying in terms of like environments, like you end up having like a lot of like custom, like containers and like environment conflicts. And like, it's very hard to set up like a unified container that like can serve like a data scientist, because like, there's always like packages that break. And so I think there's a lot of different reasons why the technology wasn't well suited for back end. And I think the attitude at that time is often like, you know, like you had friction between the data team and the platform team, like, well, it works for the back end stuff, you know, why don't you just like, you know, make it work. But like, I actually felt like data teams, you know, or at this point now, like there's so much, so many people working with data, and like they, to some extent, like deserve their own tools and their own tool chains, and like optimizing for that is not something people have done. So that's, that's sort of like very abstract philosophical reason why I started Model. And then, and then I got sucked into this like rabbit hole of like container cold start and, you know, like whatever, Linux, page cache, you know, file system optimizations. Yeah, tell people, I think the first time I met you, I think you told me some numbers, but I don't remember, like, what are the main achievements that you were unhappy with the status quo? And then you built your own container stack?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.

Search evidence