Erik Bernhardsson, Modal CEO on AI Infra, Data Compute & Scaling GPUs
Episode description
Erik Bernhardsson is the founder and CEO of Modal, the serverless platform for AI, data and ML teams that enables deployment of generative AI models, large-scale batch jobs, and job queues with effortless scaling across thousands of CPUs and GPUs. Modal's pay-per-use model charges only for actual compute time down to the CPU cycle, eliminating idle costs while accelerating development and reducing infrastructure overhead. Before founding Modal, he served as CTO of Better.com (2015-2020), scaling the engineering team from 1 to 300 people, and spent seven years at Spotify where he built their music recommendation system. With a background in competitive programming—including an IOI gold medal—Erik combines deep technical expertise with leadership experience and shares insights on technology, data, and management through his blog at erikbern.com.Topics:
- How compute economics are changing with GPU demand and what that means for AI startups
- Scaling engineering teams from 1 to 300+ (lessons from Better.com)
- Fundraising and building in the crowded devtools/infrastructure space
#AI #MachineLearning #Serverless #CloudComputing #DevTools #Infrastructure