The Infra Pod

Tim and Ian reflect on 2023 infrastructure trends, focusing on cost optimization and shifting to unit economics. They delve into unpredictable success in serverless tech, evolution of React components, WebAssembly potential, and integration of AI in infrastructure products.

Andy Grove discusses his mission to build the Big Data ecosystem in Rust and the challenges he faced. He talks about using Rust for big data and building a Rust implementation of Apache Arrow. The podcast also explores optimizing Spark's performance and the future of composable data systems. It highlights exciting developments in Data Fusion and the need for better benchmark results.

Ian and Tim sat down with Erik (CEO of Modal Labs) that's gaining wide adoption of the serverless platform built for data teams. Come sit down and listen with us how the journey started, and what's Erik hot spicy future take on the serverless infra.

Ian and Tim sat down with Omar Khattab about the research project DSPy, that's changing how users interact with LLMs from creating prompts to have a programming framework that searches and optimizes the best prompts for the task. Come listen about the thought process around DSPy and how it can fundamentally changes how we interact with LLMs and AI models as a whole!

Ian and Tim invited the cofounders of Warpstream (Serverless Kafka built on S3) to talk about the tradeoffs of building a new Streaming product that is designed from ground up to work on top of Cloud storage like S3, and also what the future implications mean.

Ian and Tim are back to interview another YAIGer Shishir G. Patil, who is a PhD at Berkeley that worked on the popular LLM research + project Gorilla, that allows LLMs to call APIs automatically. We dive into how Gorilla works and what is the future implications it brings to the infra / developer space.

Ian (Snyk) and Tim (Essence VC) sat down with Mike (CEO of Smallstep) to talk about how software security will change, as we see more security problems becomes infrastructure problems. How does the industry potentially change if we think about security problems from the infra angle? What's the hurdle and benefits? Listen in to learn more!

In this podcast, Guido Appenzeller, ex-VMWare & Intel Group CTO, debates with Maxis Ian Livingstone and Timothy Chen about the future of AI in developer roles. They discuss the impact of language models on infrastructure software, the importance of embracing new technologies in software development, the potential applications of autonomous agents in workflows, and the challenges of predicting the future in infrastructure and AI.

Transactions is what makes critical applications with state works in production, and it has been decades of research and iterations of having developers leveraging the tools that exists to implement transactions in their applications. Ian and I are sitting down with Yoko (investor from a16z) and Tony (CTO from Inngest) to chat about the new Modern Transactional Stack (https://a16z.com/2023/04/14/the-modern-transactional-stack/), and how it's looking to shape up the industry in the near future.

Ian and I sat down with Stephen Balaban (CEO / founder from Lambda labs), to talk about how Stephen started Lambda Labs inspired by Japanese Anime, into a Computer Vision API, and finally a GPU hosted cloud. We also introduced a new section called the "Spicy Future", and we got spicy :) Come listen to how we noodled on how we will get closer to AGI and what will happen when it does.