Disclosure certainty 4/5 debate potential 1/5

Bernhardsson: Stable Diffusion Release Drove Initial Traction for Modal

Erik Bernhardsson · No Priors Ep. 96 | With Modal CEO and Founder Erik Bernhardsson · Jan 9, 2025 · at 3:13

Modal founder and CEO Erik Bernhardsson reflects on how the release of Stable Diffusion catalyzed developer adoption of Modal's serverless GPU infrastructure.

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“The main thing that really started driving all the traction was when stable diffusion came out. And a bunch of people came to us and like, Hey, actually, this looks kind of cool. Like you have GPU access. It's very easy to, you know, you have to think about, you know, spinning up machines and provisioning them. And so that was like our first sort of killer app was like just doing gen AI in a serverless way with the focus of diffusion models.”

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