Jul 08, 2026

The 100,000 Sandbox Problem — Akshat Bubna, Modal CTO

Modal CTO Akshat Bubna discusses the company's shift from developer to agent experience, highlighting why traditional cloud infrastructure fails for bursty AI workloads. He details Modal's primitives like elastic inference with GPU snapshotting and speculative decoding, agent sandboxes for RL rollouts, multi-node training with RDMA, and a "supercloud" strategy across 17 providers. The conversation also covers the importance of observability, hard guardrails for production agents, and AI's role in making infrastructure exciting again.

May 26, 2026

Frontier AI at Home — Alex Cheema, EXO Labs

Alex Cheema from EXO Labs explores the path to a 100x improvement in the price-performance of running frontier AI models locally. The talk covers full-stack optimization strategies, including kernel fusion for a 30% performance boost, RDMA for scalable tensor parallelism, and a novel approach of splitting prefill and decode phases across heterogeneous hardware (e.g., an RTX GPU and Mac Studios) to significantly speed up large-prompt inference.