Erik Bernhardsson, CEO of Modal, traces his path from building Spotify's recommendation system to founding a serverless GPU cloud, and explains how Modal aggregates demand, secures GPU capacity, weighs renting against owning, and sees agent sandboxes becoming a major product line.
Dean Quiñanola, a staff engineer at Runpod, presents Runpod Flash, a way to run Python on cloud GPUs as if they were local, with no Dockerfiles, image builds, or registry pushes. The talk covers serverless and load-balanced endpoints, endpoint-to-endpoint calls, network volumes with warm caching, and live serverless iteration. A live demo moves from GPU detection to text and image generation and then deploys to production with a single command.