Building a Cloud Nobody Owns

Brandon interviews Dominic Williams, founder, president, and chief scientist of the DFINITY Foundation, about the Internet Computer and why he set out to build a new back-end compute stack. Williams traces his path from building the kids' MMO Fight My Monster, one of the first serious production users of Cassandra, to decentralized networks and the founding of DFINITY in 2016. He explains the thesis behind the Internet Computer: a stack of software running down to the silicon can never be fully secured, so he wanted a cloud created by a network protocol, where software is tamper-proof, always on, and secure by default without firewalls, patches, or security and sysadmin teams.

Williams walks through how it works. Code compiles to WebAssembly and runs in persistent memory, replicated across independent nodes using Byzantine fault tolerance, so there is no database or file system to connect to, and a misbehaving node, even a "Dr. Evil" one, cannot corrupt the result. Brandon presses on data protection, and Williams points to hardware encapsulation such as AMD SEV-SNP and the ability to choose trusted node providers. He then describes cloud engines, which let an enterprise pick nodes from a marketplace (hyperscalers, independent data centers, or on-prem), reconfigure them without downtime, and avoid vendor lock-in, with payment handled behind the scenes so it looks like a conventional cloud.

On adoption, Williams says data sovereignty is a major driver, citing the U.S. CLOUD Act and governments, such as Pakistan, that want infrastructure they control and can inspect as open source. He describes Caffeine, which builds apps on the Internet Computer from a chat prompt, and Open SaaS, a suite meant to replace siloed SaaS tools with a single AI-aware system. To get started, he recommends pasting the prompt from the skills site into a coding assistant and having it write the back end in Motoko, a language designed for AI agents that guards against data loss when upgrading apps in production. Cloud engine coupons are expected to open up soon.

SHOW: 1070

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Enterprise AI Show #1070 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtu.be/-H4KS5AMKI8

SHOW SPONSORS:

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SHOW LINKS

• DFINITY Foundation
• Internet Computer
• OpenCloud (cloud engines)
• Internet Computer Skills: Get Started
• DFINITY Unveils Open SaaS Vision for AI-Powered Business Software
• Caffeine
• Motoko programming language
• WebAssembly
• Apache Cassandra
• LinkedIn: thedwilliams
• Twitter/X: @dominic_w

GUEST BIO

Dominic Williams is the founder, president, and chief scientist of the DFINITY Foundation, the Zurich-based non-profit behind the Internet Computer, which he began developing in 2015 and launched in 2021. A longtime engineer-entrepreneur focused on distributed systems, he previously founded the MMO game Fight My Monster and served as president and CTO of the Palo Alto incubator String Labs.

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