Erik Bernhardsson
Founder and CEO, Modal Labs · 1 appearance on the record.
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founderexecutiveengineer@bernhardsson ↗LinkedIn ↗erikbern.com ↗
Erik Bernhardsson is the founder and CEO of Modal Labs, a serverless cloud platform for AI and compute workloads. He previously served as CTO at Better.com and spent six years at Spotify, where he built music recommendation systems and created Luigi and Annoy.
30statements → 11claims → 4claims resolved → 100%fully supported → 3.8/5average certainty → 2.2/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 5said about them ↓
4 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 7 not checkable as stated how the 11 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
5 predictions · 6 assertions · 5 opinions · 9 insights · 5 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 11 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 4 are resolved, and 7 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Erik argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
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Everything Erik Bernhardsson said on Latent Space that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
AI Productivity Gains Will Ultimately Increase Demand for Software Engineers
“Like, I think we can, you know, 10 x the amount of developers, and still, you know, have a lot of people making a lot of money, you know, building amazing software, and also being, while at the same time being more productive. Like, I never understood this, li…”
VCs Subsidizing AI Inference Will Not See Their Expected Returns
“In the end, like, I don't think VCs will have the return they expected. Like, you know, in these things, but guess who's going to benefit? Like, you know, it's the consumers, right? Like someone's like reaping that the value of this. And that's, I think an ama…”
Startups Must Build Deep Infrastructure Rather Than Thin Kubernetes Wrappers
“And so one of my frustrations has been like so many startups are like, in my opinion, like Kubernetes wrappers and like, you know, like, and not very like thick wrappers, like fairly thin wrappers. And I think, you know, every startup is a wrapper to some exte…”
Kubernetes Works for Backend Teams but Fails Data Teams
“Like in particular, like Kubernetes, I feel like it's like kind of worked okay for backend teams, but not so well for data teams.”
AWS Has Always Struggled With Developer Experience
“AWS has always like struggled with developer experience”
Developer Productivity Will Continue Growing 10x Per Decade
“You look at the developers are, I've been getting like probably 10 X more productive every decade for the last four, four decades or something that was kind of crazy. Like on an exponential scale, we're talking about 10 X or is there a 10,000 X like, you know,…”
Serverless Architecture Fits Generative AI Far Better Than Backend Services
“Serverless always, to me, felt like a little bit of, like, a solution looking for a problem. I don't know, I don't actually, like, don't think, like, backend is, like, the problem that needs serverless, or, like, not as much, but I look at data, and in particu…”
Modal Users Save Money on Inference Despite Higher GPU Rates
“In many cases, like users who do inference on those platforms or those clouds even though we charge a slightly higher price per, per GPU hour, a lot of users like moving their large scale inference use cases to model, like end up saving a lot of money because …”
VCs Will Eventually Force Modular to Offer a Hosted Cloud Service
“I'm sure their VCs at some point are gonna force them to reconsider.”
Cloud Infra Startups Must Capture the Entire Hobbyist-to-Enterprise Spectrum
“The only way to do, to build infrastructure to build a successful infrastructure company in the long run in, in, in the cloud today is, You have to appeal to the entire spectrum, right? Or at least like the enterprise, like you have to capture the enterprise m…”
Buying Dedicated GPU Clusters Offers Better Economics for Model Training
“In training, I think, you know, there's less software differentiation. So in training, I think there's certainly, like, better economics of, like, buying big clusters.”
Only Tech Giants Will Build In-House AI Infrastructure Long-Term
“I think a lot of these companies over in the long run, like, you know, they're accepted maybe super big ones, like, you know, the Facebook and Google, they're always gonna build their own ones, but like everyone else, like some extent, you know, I think they'r…”
Modal Can Fan Out Workloads to Thousands of GPUs in Minutes
“It's like pretty easy in Moto, like, fan out to like, you know, at least like a hundred GPUs, like in a few seconds, and you know, if you give it like a couple of minutes, like we can, you know, you can fan out to like thousands of GPUs.”
AI Inference Margins Will Rise While Consumer Prices Stay Low
“Margins are gonna go up for sure, but I don't know if prices will go up, because like, GPU prices have to drop eventually, right? So like, you know, like in the long run, I still think like prices may not go up that much but certainly margins will go up.”
Oracle Cloud GPUs Actually Offer Great Value for Money
“I love Oracle's GPUs. I mean, I don't, like, I don't know why, you know, what the economics looks like for Oracle, but like, I think they're great value for money. Like, we run a bunch of stuff in Oracle and They have bare metal machines with, like, two teraby…”
Buying Physical Hardware Is a Poor Use of Venture Capital
“My feeling is that when you're a venture-funded startup, like, buying physical hardware is maybe not the best use of the money.”
Daniel Ek Is a Generational CEO Among Swedish Startups
“Overall, I mean, I think he was a great CEO, like, definitely, you know, up there, like, generational CEO, at least for, like, Swedish startups.”
Developer Productivity Is Best Measured by Iteration Feedback Speed
“I think the best way to measure developer productivity is, like, in terms of the feedback loops. Like, it, like, in, like, How quickly when you iterate, like when you write code, like how quickly can you get feedback? And at the innermost loop, it's like runni…”
99% of Data in Multi-Gigabyte Docker Images Is Never Read
“It turns out, like, when you start a Docker container, like, first of all, like, most Docker images are, like, several gigabytes, and, like, 99% of that is never going to be consumed.”
Suno Uses Modal for Its AI Music Production Infrastructure
“Yeah, so, I mean, they're using model for, like, production infrastructure, like, they have their own, like, custom model, like, custom code and custom weights, you know, for AI-generated music, Suno.ai.”
Snowflake Proved Layer-Two Clouds Can Win on Developer Experience
“And I think Snowflake, you know, to me won because like, I mean, in the end, like AWS makes all the money anyway, like, and like Snowflake just had the ability to like focus on like developer experience or like, you know, or user experience. And to me, like re…”
Modal Will Not Try to Compete Directly With OpenAI's API
“So many people get started with APIs and that's just, you know, they're just dominating a space in particular, open AI. Right. And that's not necessarily like a place where we aim to compete. I mean, maybe at some point, but like, it's just not like a core foc…”
Modal's Sandbox Feature Is Evolving Into a Platform for Platforms
“The core, like, container infrastructure we offer could actually be, like, you know, unbundled from, like, the client SDK and offered to, like, other, you know, like, we're talking to a couple of, like other companies that want to run, you know, through their,…”
Switching Costs for Open-Source LLM Inference Providers Are Zero
“The LLM space is, like, the opposite. Like, the switching cost of LLMs is zero, right? Like, if all you're doing is, like, straight up, like, at least, like, open source, right? Like, if all you're doing is, like, you know, using some, you know, inference endp…”
The other half of the tape: Erik Bernhardsson's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 5 times in 3 episodes on Latent Space. every mention, with the transcript →
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Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Truly Serverless Infra for AI Engineers - with Erik Bernhardsson of Modal | Feb 19, 2024 | 45m |