Rodrigo Liang, CEO of SambaNova Systems, discusses how inference speed and pricing tiers will evolve in comparison to broadband and cellular data adoption.
“And so, as the cost of delivering fast goes down, you're going to see most people switch over to the fastest. And this is why I feel like, you know, the premium inference, which is large models, which equals the most accurate. The most accurate models and fast, ultimately steady state is what everybody's going to want.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
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“And so by the time we released SN-Forty a couple years ago, it became incredibly popular, because instead of a 130, a 140 kilowatt rack of NVIDIA GPU, we were outperforming them with a 10 kilowatt SN-Forty rack.”
Rodrigo LiangJul 17, 2026▶ 5:52Inference 101: SambaNova CEO Rodrigo Liang · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
Opinion
Liang: Groq and Cerebras can only run small models fast
“Or you look at services like Rock Cerebus that run fast, you can only run the small models, right?”
Rodrigo LiangJul 17, 2026▶ 17:04Inference 101: SambaNova CEO Rodrigo Liang · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
Opinion
Liang: Nvidia GPUs are a commodity offering very limited cost advantage
“People forget, as much as NVIDIA costs, it's commodity. Right? Because what you offer is the same as what your neighbor offers and your differentiation is, I can save you a little bit of money because maybe I got a discount from NVIDIA, right? Or maybe I got a…”
Rodrigo LiangJul 17, 2026▶ 33:47Inference 101: SambaNova CEO Rodrigo Liang · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
AssertionSupported
Liang: SambaNova serves 1.5T parameter models on one rack versus 10-20
“And so with sum it over, that minimum quantum is down to one rack. Right, where if you have other, other service providers, you just run, say, a DeepSeq model, which is now one and a half trillion parameters, just to run that, the minimum for some of the other…”
Rodrigo LiangJul 17, 2026▶ 8:22Inference 101: SambaNova CEO Rodrigo Liang · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
PredictionNot checkable as stated
Liang: Agentic AI will drive a wave of mid-sized distributed data centers
“And I think you're going to see this new wave of companies that are doing distributed data centers, right? So these data centers are mid-sized, right? They're mid-sized, and it's going to be even more important as you go into this agentic world”
Rodrigo LiangJul 17, 2026▶ 11:27Inference 101: SambaNova CEO Rodrigo Liang · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
PredictionNot checkable as stated
Liang: Frontier AI models are heading toward 10 trillion parameters
“The new models are heading towards 10 trillion. Even the open source models are already one to two trillion parameter models, and so now you're starting to see these models getting very big because people are looking for accuracy, right?”
Rodrigo LiangJul 17, 2026▶ 16:12Inference 101: SambaNova CEO Rodrigo Liang · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea
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