20VC: Who Wins the Inference Market | Has Open-Source LLM Inference Peaked? | What Happens to the Cost of Compute | The Real Limits of Post-Training and RL with Erik Bernhardsson, Modal CEO

I think there is an opportunity to create a hundred billion dollar company with a lot of specialized models in the inference. There's gonna be a pullback. I'm okay with that, because I think the long term opportunity is so fucking big. There's just so much demand for it. It's like so large. I don't want to sell this company because I would just go and start modal two. We've lost new grads going to, you know, some of the labs for like insane like talking, you know, twenty plus million. I mean, these are exceptional people, exceptional. This is 20 VC with me, Harry Sabbings. And do you know what I wish I knew 12 months ago that I now know? The demand for inference, it's infinite. And we're seeing some of the biggest companies in the world be built in this space. Today I'm thrilled to welcome one of those founders to the hot seat in the form of Eric, co-founder and CEO of Modal. Now, Modal just hit a Billion in ARR. They just raised$750 million led by Excel, and they're priced at$15.75 billion today. I actually think it's a steal, by the way. But today we dig into the inference market, what to come, what no one sees that everyone should see, and so much more. This was a phenomenal discussion with Eric. But before we dive into the show today, Blitzy, the autonomous software development platform that's built for Enterprise Scale, is proud to sponsor today's show. Enterprise codebases have grown beyond human comprehension. Tens of millions of lines, decades of tac-dat, complexity existing tools cannot fathom.

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