Modal CTO Akshat Bubna discusses why operating systems researchers and principles are critical for optimizing AI inference and reinforcement learning pipelines.
“Like the way you move around your KV cache and how efficiently you can do it, how efficiently you move your weights from your training GPUs to your inference GPUs in RL is, there's a lot of degrees of freedom, and it is basically a systems problem of Moving memory around. Scheduling.”
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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.”
Akshat BubnaJul 8, 2026▶ 18:48The Future of AI Infra: from Kubernetes to Agent Sandboxes — Akshat Bubna, Modal CTO
Opinion
Bubna: Kubernetes lacks burstiness support and has terrible developer experience
“Kubernetes is hard to manage. It's not built for burstiness and custom images and has a terrible developer experience.”
Akshat BubnaJul 8, 2026▶ 2:12The Future of AI Infra: from Kubernetes to Agent Sandboxes — Akshat Bubna, Modal CTO
Opinion
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.”
Akshat BubnaJul 8, 2026▶ 7:07The Future of AI Infra: from Kubernetes to Agent Sandboxes — Akshat Bubna, Modal CTO
“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.”
Akshat BubnaJul 8, 2026▶ 17:13The Future of AI Infra: from Kubernetes to Agent Sandboxes — Akshat Bubna, Modal CTO
Opinion
Bubna: Sandboxes Require Hard Boundaries, Not LLM-Mediated Permissions
“I'm skeptical of LLM-mediated permissions for stuff that is At the sandbox level, because you do want hard boundaries. Otherwise, obviously someone can exfiltrate stuff.”
Akshat BubnaJul 8, 2026▶ 44:21The Future of AI Infra: from Kubernetes to Agent Sandboxes — Akshat Bubna, Modal CTO
Insight
Bubna: Model APIs primarily serve a less sticky hobbyist market
“This is one thing we've kind of stayed away from is providing an API for models, because I think providing Model APIs is, some of it ends up serving like a really hobbyist market, which is much less sticky.”
Akshat BubnaJul 8, 2026▶ 49:49The Future of AI Infra: from Kubernetes to Agent Sandboxes — Akshat Bubna, Modal CTO
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