Bubna: Thousands more companies will post-train and deploy open-source models
Akshat Bubna · The Future of AI Infra: from Kubernetes to Agent Sandboxes — Akshat Bubna, Modal CTO · Jul 8, 2026 · at 42:17
Modal CTO Akshat Bubna discusses upcoming AI infrastructure demands and adoption trends for LLMs and open-source models.
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“I think for example, LM inference, thousands more companies are going to post train their own models and deploy open source models for inference.”
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“People talk a lot about, we made these kernels faster and whatnot, but improving kernel only give you like a few percentage points of improvement and increasing except length literally is a multiplicative decrease.”
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“Kubernetes is hard to manage. It's not built for burstiness and custom images and has a terrible developer experience.”
Bubna: System Observability Is Becoming More Important Than Reading Code
“You still need humans to go interpret what's going on and you know, make judgment calls and whatnot. And that's, I feel like maybe more important now than looking at the code itself.”
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“Recently we shared our work on dflash, which is a block-based speculator, and we've open sourced all of it, so you can get, by using open source dflash, you can get the same performance as you would with one of the proprietary providers.”