Episode 8: Anyscale CEO, Robert Nishihara

Outset Capital's Ali Rohde and Kanjun Qiu interview @anyscale CEO, Robert Nishihara. This fireside chat is part of our 'Thursday Nights in AI" series, co-hosted by Outset Capital and Imbue. Join our upcoming events! Full list here: https://www.outsetcapital.com/thursda... About Outset: Outset Capital is led by Ali Rohde, Kanjun Qiu, and Josh Albrecht — AI practitioners investing in AI, deeptech, and the future of work. We back companies at the outset and love to be the first check in. About Imbue: Imbue is an AI research company aiming to rekindle the dream of the personal computer—by creating practical AI agents that can accomplish larger goals and safely work for us in the real world. They are hiring! https://imbue.com/careers About Anyscale: First there was Ray, an open source project from the UC Berkeley RISELab. Ray came out of their experience with the scaling challenges around machine learning and AI. From there, they built a fully managed platform for Ray to make the toughest problems in distributed computing easier for developers. That’s Anyscale. Learn more about Anyscale: https://www.anyscale.com/ Learn more about Robert: http://www.robertnishihara.com/ 00:00 Intro 01:18 Robert's founder journey 04:42 Difference between Anyscale and Ray 05:43 On what kinds of open-source projects make good business 08:17 How the AI boom changed Anyscale 10:00 Anyscale's new LLM API 11:05 How enterprise companies use Anyscale 12:50 How startups use Anyscale 13:35 Are big tech companies incorporating AI just to be included in the hype? 15:29 Anyscale and autonomous AI agents 17:20 Anyscale Endpoints and Anyscale Private Endpoints 18:04 Why companies don't want to give their data to OpenAI 19:45 Anyscale is the lowest price point on the market 20:40 Anyscale's new LLM-powered features 22:36 Open-source vs. closed source 23:24 Future of AI 24:24 Did Robert's vision for Anyscale come true? 27:12 "Under-hyped" fields in AI 28:32 How Robert is keeping up with advancements in AI 29:45 Q&A 29:59 Impact of GPU scarcity 31:49 NVIDIA monopoly 34:14 Looking back, will you still open-source Ray? 37:37 Conversion rate from Ray to Anyscale 39:00 Databricks: competitor or partner? 39:43 What layers of stack should an AI product have on Day 1? 40:48 What compute is more needed in the future: training or inference?