Is Smaller AI Training Underserved?

Erik Bernhardsson says smaller AI training is an underserved market. Huge training runs go to Neo cloud mega deals for 100,000 GPUs. Researchers iterating and people training smaller models are the opening left behind.

Modal has been building a training product for multiple years, on and off. The company now has 150 engineers. A year or two ago the team was much smaller, so inference stayed the sole focus for many years. A larger team can place bets in other markets: post-training, reinforcement learning, storage, data warehousing, feature stores, and real-time streaming pipelines.

The long-term view of Modal is a full set of building blocks. Someone who wants to build AI work can take the blocks and compose them. With the right building blocks, software can build almost anything.