Modal and Scaling AI Inference with Erik Bernhardsson

Modal is a serverless compute platform that’s specifically focused on AI workloads. The company’s goal is to enable AI teams to quickly spin up GPU-enabled containers, and rapidly iterate and autoscale.

It was founded by Erik Bernhardsson who was previously at Spotify for 7 years where he built the music recommendation system and the popular Luigi workflow scheduler.

In this episode, Erik joins Sean Falconer to talk about the motivation for founding his company, the market gap in ML and AI tooling, optimizing container cold start, Modal’s interface design, and more.

Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn.

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