The Ledger
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Kant: External software and agent frameworks will collapse into base models
“But we have a phrase at poolside, which is over time, everything collapses into the models.”
Kant: Full-stack AI infrastructure ownership cuts token costs 20-40%
“So when you take all those margins out, all of a sudden you can start seeing that you can serve your tokens, 2030, 40% cheaper than someone else.”
Kant: AI foundation model gross margins will settle near 40%
“I'm not yet convinced that gross margins in our industry will look like a SaaS company, like 80% plus. I think when we're talking about a commodity as intelligence, that we build value added services on top. Right. It's a foundation model company. On one hand,…”
Kant: Most developers will adopt AI pair programmers within two years
“Well, the first thing that I think is at this point, almost uncontested, but frankly, when I was building source, most people didn't think would happen is the fact that the majority, if not all developers in the next couple of years in the world will adopt som…”
Poolside built custom distributed LLM training framework from scratch
“We didn't take Megatron or DeepSpeed or kind of the big open source frameworks for training large language models. As our base, we built our own from scratch and we built our own distributed training for our pre-training stage.”
Poolside found top AI talent split 50/50 between North America and Europe
“We went through about 3200 or 3200 people that we ended up putting on the list. And we had this location column, like think genuinely Google spreadsheet, you know, like where's someone based. And at some point we looked at all these locations and we're like, w…”
Kant: Poolside is training world's largest models using reversible layers
“We've decided to scale up rev nets, reversible layers. So, so to the best of our knowledge, I think we're training the world's largest models using reversible layers that, that we've seen at least that nothing else that we're aware of publicly.”
Kant: Non-engineers will build software via AI prompts within three years
“We don't think we're more than three years out to that point where a non-engineer, someone with no coding, you know, software development background is able to come and give one of those high level vague things of what they want built, right? Cause that's what…”
Kant: Poolside's Project Horizon is an expandable two-gigawatt data center campus
“So Project Horizon, in a nutshell, is today announced a two gigawatt campus. We can actually go far beyond two gigawatts on the site that we're in.”
Kant: Poolside starting construction on 250MW natural gas data center in 2025
“And so what you're seeing from us is that before the end of this year, we're starting construction on a 250 megawatt data center. It's natural gas powered with grid connection as a backup, and it will house an incredible amount of compute, but it will be the f…”
Kant: Poolside first compute online late 2025, 250MW by Q1 2027
“So at the beginning of Q four, end of Q three, so next year, we've got the first compute coming online. And then we're finalizing in Q one, 20, 27, the first you know, 250 megawatts, but already next summer, the next 250 megawatts starts construction. It's a s…”
Kant: Founders entering new domains should interview 100+ candidates per role
“And what I found to be one of the best advice I got a very long time ago, whenever you find yourself in that situation, well, this is when you want to start finding the experts to join you, but how do you find the experts? Because you yourself aren't. And here…”
Kant: Linearly adding GPUs to train larger AI models causes exponential training delays
“It is not that I can linearly add more GPUs and train increasingly a more larger model. If I do so, the time it takes becomes exponentially longer.”
Kant: A 250MW AI data center costs roughly $8 billion to build
“To energize, 250 megawatts is about half a billion dollars worth of physical infrastructure. So in the case of gas turbines, it's gas turbines, but there's different paths to it. Building a data center, like the powered shell that brings together all of the eq…”
Eiso Kant: Renewable-only data centers with battery storage are not economically viable yet
“Renewables only, in combination with the battery capacity that you would need to power a data center if you want renewable only, it's just not economically viable yet.”
Kant: Poolside is building a 250MW data center with under 450 workers
“When we're building 250 megawatts, We're doing it with a less than 450 person on site workforce with very skilled tradesmen and construction workers that we're bringing over there and we're housing over there versus a world where you might need traditionally 2…”
Poolside will launch a direct competitor to GitHub Copilot X in 2024
“But in terms of what we're delivering to the end user, we're starting with a direct competitor to get up Copilot X. And so natural language, multi-turn dialogue system. Where developers give instructions of what they want done while they're in their editor. Th…”
Mistral and Poolside funding is a trickle compared to OpenAI, says Polu
“It's already awesome that Mistral was able to raise that much, that Toolside is able to raise that much, but it's a trickle compared to what Open Air is raising, compared to what Anthropik is raising.”
Kant: Expert RL will lift enterprise agent quality to 90% in years
“And I think what we'll see in the next couple of years is a lot of model companies ourselves as well. We go into these enterprises. We find high value use cases. We use our agents to get to 60 or 70% You know, of quality, and then use additional reinforcement …”
Kant predicts Poolside's models will reach frontier performance within 12 to 18 months
“Models reach the frontier. That's right now. I think we see a straight line towards this.”
Kant: 95% of Poolside's researchers sit outside Silicon Valley
“And still today, if we look at where, like, researchers for pool sites sit, they sit predominantly, you know, 95% outside of Silicon Valley.”
Kant: Poolside operates inside defense SCIFs and air-gapped servers
“So we today operate on workstations that go into SCIFs. We operate on servers that are, you know, on-prem or even as far as air-gapped.”
Kant: Poolside aims to power all knowledge work globally
“And so we're starting to open up much more broader outside of software development and come back to what we've always said, like we want to be able to power all of knowledge work in the world.”
Kant details Poolside's Laguna model training timeline and 41,000 GB300 cluster
“That's our upcoming family of models, Laguna, where we'll have a small, a medium, and a large. So small is finishing training in a couple of weeks, medium actually starts training this week and large starts training as our 41,000 GB 300 come online.”
Kant: CoreWeave is the anchor tenant for Poolside's new data center
“They are the anchor tenant on our data center.”
Eiso Kant: Poolside pre-trains models on a 50/50 language-code split
“Our data split is about 50, 50 between language and code.”
Poolside and Reflection are building clusters with massive B200 GPU deployments
“They're companies like Poolside. They're building out tens of thousands of B-two hundred, GB-two hundred chips. You know, there's other folks like Reflection who are who are building out. Tens of thousands of B 200 chips.”
Poolside scales its RL environment repository to over 1M codebases
“Right now we have over a million of those environments and tens of millions of revisions, putting us in like the thirty million range.”
Poolside plans eight years of construction for West Texas data center project
“When we talk about this big multi-gigawatt project, we've got about eight years worth of construction that we are planning out there”
Poolside plans enterprise strategy targeting companies with up to 100k developers
“And so you're going to see a strong emphasis of us of also bringing poolside into enterprises, into complex environments where there might be 10,000 or a 100,000 developers, where the model needs to continuously learn and be fine-tuned on their data, where it'…”
Kant: Poolside is vertically integrating custom foundation models and offering APIs
“We deliver this AI pair programming assistant full application stack with the models, I think fully vertically integrated with our own foundation models trained from scratch, but then also exposing those models with an API to allow other people to build all th…”