What Is Modal's Killer App?

Erik Bernhardsson says Stable Diffusion turned out to be the killer app for Modal, the platform he built to make it easy to run code in the cloud. ChatGPT was not quite the killer app. The building started in 2021, before the ChatGPT launch.

At Spotify he released Luigi, an open source workflow orchestration framework in the same category as Airflow and Prefect. Luigi got a lot of attention, and he never turned it into a business. In 2021 he came back to workflow orchestration and started hacking on ways to orchestrate code running in the cloud. Executing the compute was the bigger problem, so he left workflow scheduling on the shelf and never returned to it. Modal began fairly general purpose, covering GPU code, AI and machine learning, or data work, with the effort aimed at scaling up and making the developer experience strong. Very early the team went deep in the stack, built their own file system, and built their own container runtime.

Stable Diffusion came out in the same fall. Modal had only four or five people. A lot of people came wanting to run the model. He still framed the conclusion with a maybe, and he called GenAI inference a really good use case for Modal.