Ep 21: Modal CEO Erik Bernhardsson on Bringing Development to the Cloud, the GPU Market, and GenAI Music

Jacob and Pat sit down with Erik Bernhardsson, the founder of Modal Labs, a data infrastructure company providing GPU compute to data teams. On this episode we discussed Erik’s thoughts on the AI chip market, the most popular GenAI use cases on Modal, and even Oracle Cloud’s resurgence in the AI start-up market.

 

0:00 intro

0:45 motivation for founding Modal

6:35 advantages that Modal gives developers

9:21 early applications built with Modal

11:58 challenges for AI developers

16:31 GPU access today

20:09 Vector DB companies

24:55 why is cloud adoption so slow?

31:30 Oracle Cloud

39:22 AI music generation

42:05 over-hyped/under-hyped

43:26 what Erik wishes he knew when starting Modal

45:53 episode debrief

 

With your co-hosts: 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

Jacob is an AI investor at Redpoint Ventures. He's led Redpoint's investments in companies like Abridge, Physical Intelligence & Legora. Follow Jacob on Twitter (@jacobeffron).

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