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Speaker unverified: belief

11 Apr 2025 Latent Space SF Compute: Commoditizing Compute to solve the GPU Bubble forever

“For those who are not familiar with derivatives markets, I can go ahead and say this because the point of being cash settled, which is something that you mentioned, which I think people might miss, is that you don't have to take physical delivery of the GPUs.”

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Speaker unverified
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Not verified from this transcript
Claim type
belief
Recorded
11 Apr 2025
Publisher
Latent Space

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…hing. So we ask for this and we get this from a lot of our vendors, which means we have quite a lot of ability to solve problems for customers in a way that you might not actually get from a reseller. Oftentimes we are the person who's debugging your cluster. For most customers that we work with, we have Slack channel. Our entire engineering team gets put in the Slack channel. If there was a problem at 2am, we are the ones who are debugging your problem at 2am. Not always the case because we don't physically run the hardware cluster or like the data center itself, but most problems are solvable through this. So that's the auditing side. The other side is I think of a standardization or whatever you call it. Beyond auditing. The other part of the work is kind of standardizing the commodity contracts. Yeah. So there's two ways that we do that. One is that you set like a this or better list. So you set like a spec list and you say, oh, you're going to get like a common variability is the amount of storage on the cluster. And so you'll say like, oh, you're going to get X or better. And there's some guarantee minimum and sometimes you might get more. And then we're working on a persistent storage layer that might sort of abstract a lot of this way, but mostly it's that. And then there's like a white list of motherboards and various things. Genres of things. But the other part is we run the clusters from bare metal up. And so we make a thing that's this like it's a UEFI shim. And if you're not familiar with what UEFI is, a UEFI is like the sort of firmware modern version of BIOS. Modern meaning it's been around for like forever. But you know, BIOS is like really old. It's like this whole IBM thing. And you can write code that exists at the UEFI layer. And again, when you hear UEFI, you should think BIOS. And it does the same sort of thing. It does the same thing as a Pixie boot, but in environments in which Pixie boot doesn't necessarily always work for us. So it basically sits at your BIOS, downloads an image, boots into an image that's like custom for the user. And then on top of that image, we can throw Kubernetes on it. We can throw VMs on it or whatever you want. And at some point, we'll probably like do more stuff with that. But that's functionally what we can do. The nice thing, though, is that because you control from that layer, you can easily image an entire cluster. You make it all the same. You can run your performance tests all automated. So much nicer. Right. Than what we used to do. Yeah. I mean, that is a very important work. I think like for me, as a trader, I need standard contracts. And so there basically needs to be the safe of a GPU. Yes. What we functionally do is we have a market under the hood that is focused on the buyer and the seller, and it's optimized for them. And then beyond that, for a trader, you can standardize around a certain segment of it. And you can trade on that contract. That's the goal that we're trying to get to. But you start by making something that works really well for buyers and really well for sellers. certain segment of it. And you can trade on that contract. That's the goal that we're trying to get to. But you start by making something that works really well for buyers and really well for sellers. For those who are not familiar with derivatives markets, I can go ahead and say this because the point of being cash settled, which is something that you mentioned, which I think people might miss, is that you don't have to take physical delivery of the GPUs. Right. And so it's a pure financial instrument, which actually does mean that almost for certain, there will be more volume on SFC's marketplace than actually change hands in GPU terms. To be super clear. We are not a derivatives market. This doesn't happen yet. Yeah. We are not a derivatives market. We may in the future work to create a cash settled future. We are not currently a derivatives market. We are an online spot market. Yeah. I just think like people, normies get really upset when they're like, then they learn things like, oh, like derivatives on mortgages are like 12 times larger than the mortgages themselves. Yes. Yeah. No, I, um, a common thing that people have talked to us about, or like a fear or concern, I think people have is like, oh, you're financializing. Compute. And this will like cause various problems of sorts. Subprime crisis. Yeah. Um, and I think, so first I think part of this is just because crypto caused a lot of people to think about finance in the like very de-gen way for the right word. Um, and then before that, um, the sort of 2008, 2009 crisis, um, caused people to think about it also in sort of like a de-genny way. And this is very much not our mindset. The reason to create a derivative at all, or the reason to create a future at all is a risk reduction thing. Um, that's what futures do. The reason why a farmer wants a future is because they have no idea what the weather is going to do. And they don't want to be on the hook, um, for like they have small margins and if things go wrong, they really, really want to have a locked in price. Um, so that way they can like continue to exist for the next year. Data centers are the same way. The way that they solve it today is you go out and you sign long-term contracts with your customers. What that does for you is it means your business is de-risked. Um, you don't have to worry about the revenue for the next year. But that means that the customer now has to worry about what they're going to do with all this compute. And if they don't optimally use it and so on and so on, and that just pushes everything onto the startups who then in turn, push it on to VCs. And so what the VCs are forced to do in order to invest in AI is they have to go and write big, giant valuations, like pre-revenue at ridiculous multiples. So what you've done by not having a future is you've inflated the venture capital market, and that is a bubble. That's totally going to pop. At some point, like a lot of the companies are not going to work and the valuations are not going to work. And what's going to happen is a lot of these funds aren't going to return back to their LPs. And that affects the broader market. panies are not going to work and the valuations are not going to work. And what's going to happen is a lot of these funds aren't going to return back to their LPs. And that affects the broader market. The way that you solve that, the way that you add security to the entire economic system in this chain is you add a future. That's how we did it in lots of other markets. It doesn't have to be this like, oh my gosh, we're going to like speculate on GB prices and like whatever. No. The whole point of SF Compute is to reduce the risk. Reduce the technical risk. Reduce the financial risk. Let's just chill out a little bit. There's so much other random shit. It's supercomputers. There's AGI, whatever. No. Let's just like chill the fuck out. I mean, also like Dan is going, raising like at a $30 billion valuation for Ilya, you know, like. Yeah. If everybody else in all of AI is like pushing the hype and the extreme, everything we've been trying to do is go the other way. Like whole website is just like a fucking single page. Um, like the entire brand is just like, what if we were? We're like calm in nature. And then everything that we do as the product is just calm. What if we, what if we were the opposite force of the big hypey extreme thing? What if we just like chilled things out? And part of that was because we, in the beginning were at the whim of the hypey nature. Like our entire origin is every 30 days and we don't sell out, we're going to go crazy and just completely bankrupt the company. And so everybody in the company is just like, what if we just chilled out? What if, what if we stopped? Yeah. This is the first time I've ever heard derivatives are the way to chill out. Yes. No. Futures are the way to chill out. Futures are the way to chill out the entire industry. And um, we wouldn't be doing this if it wasn't that case. I like that.…

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