A product discussed on Latent Space.

The Future of AI Infra: from Kubernetes to Agent Sandboxes — Akshat Bubna, Modal CTO
Jul 8, 2026 · 59:10
Modal CTO Akshat Bubna explains how the cloud platform evolved from a serverless runtime to an AI cloud built for elastic inference, agent sandboxes, and post-training workloads. He argues that Kubernetes was never designed for bursty GPU-heavy AI workloads, so Modal built a decorator-based infrastructure that co-locates compute requirements with code. The company added GPUs a year before ChatGPT and now powers inference for custom models at Suno, Runway, and robotics firms, using GPU snapshotting to slash cold starts. Modal's new Auto Endpoints incorporate open-source DeFlash speculative decoding for frontier-level performance. For reinforcement learning rollouts, Modal provides up to 100,000 sandboxes simultaneously. The platform spans 17 cloud providers, features private IPv6 networking via eBPF, and supports serverless multi-node training with RDMA. Bubna also reveals Modal's shift from developer experience to agent experience, noting that agents benefit from the same minimalist SDK and observability tools that humans use.

AI Agents Need Computers: 74% MoM Growth, 850K/Day Runs, & New Agent Cloud — Ivan Burazin, Daytona
May 21, 2026 · 1:11:40
In this episode, Ivan Burazin, CEO of Daytona, explains why AI agents need composable computers rather than disposable code execution boxes, and how Daytona pivoted from human dev environments to building a bare-metal sandbox platform that spins up one sandbox in 60ms and 50,000 in 75 seconds. Daytona's biggest customer runs 850,000 sandboxes daily, and RL/eval workloads have surged from 0% to 50% of usage. The platform competes against managed Kubernetes (EKS/GKS) by offering stateful snapshots, dynamic resizing, and a scheduler purpose-built for agent workloads. Burazin also discusses the company's 74% month-over-month growth, the addition of Windows sandboxes, and the licensing challenges of macOS. He argues the future AI cloud will look more like Stripe than AWS, and that agents will need every kind of computer—including legacy Windows environments—to automate knowledge work.

Agent Inference at the "Speed of Light" — How NVIDIA moves like a $4.3 Trillion Startup
Mar 8, 2026 · 1:26:00
NVIDIA's Nader Khalil and Kyle Kranen join Swyx and Vibhu to explain how the company moves like a $4.3 trillion startup through speed-of-light (SOL) first-principles thinking, agent security boundaries, and the Dynamo inference engine. They argue agents should only do two of three things (files, internet, code) to prevent vulnerabilities, and detail Brev's acquisition to improve developer UX with one-click GPU access and DGX Spark integration. Kyle describes Dynamo as a data center scale inference engine that optimizes serving by scaling out, using prefill/decode disaggregation, Kubernetes-based scheduling, and model-hardware co-design to improve cost, latency, and quality. The episode covers SOL's role in creating urgency, long-context limits and potential 'unhobblers' like multi-head latent attention, and the shift toward CLI-first agent workflows for enterprise tools.

⚡️Launching Ona: Coding Agent with Fully Sandboxed Cloud Environment
Sep 1, 2025 · 33:44
Gitpod co-founders Johannes Landgraf and Chris Weichel launch Ona, a coding agent platform with fully sandboxed cloud environments, arguing that the future of development is parallel agent-driven work rather than mono-focused IDEs. They explain their rebrand from Gitpod to Ona, driven by their product outgrowing the technical name. Ona provides reproducible dev environments via dev containers and automations YAML, runs any Linux workload, and by default gives agents full autonomy (Yolo mode) since environments are ephemeral and risk-free. They dogfood heavily—75% of their PRs are co-authored by Ona. Key challenges include file edits (they settled on Anthropic's string replace tool) and underspecification by users. Pricing follows a credit model blending compute and token usage, with enterprise VPC deployment and $100 in credits for new self-serve users. They envision IDEs shifting to interfaces supporting parallel tracks, but currently offer one-click transitions to desktop editors like Cursor.

[AIEWF Preview] Containing Agent Chaos — Solomon Hykes
Jun 3, 2025 · 27:14
Solomon Hykes, creator of Docker and founder of Dagger, argues that the industry needs an open standard for AI coding agent environments to avoid repeating the fragmentation seen before Docker. Dagger, a workflow engine originally built for post-development automation (CI/CD), is now being pulled by its community into the agentic space to solve environment isolation, portability, and observability for concurrent agent teams. Hykes insists containers are the right base layer but require a new, agent-native UX—unlike legacy Dockerfile or Compose—that is decoupled from any IDE, model, or cloud provider. He critiques current vertical monoliths (e.g., proprietary IDE-hosted agent environments) and advocates for a Lego-like modular approach where the environment is the standard linchpin. Dagger integrates with existing stacks rather than replacing them, and Hykes previews fresh, unreleased content for his upcoming keynote at AI Engineer World's Fair.

npm install Agents — with Sunil Pai and Rita Kozlov (VP AI) of Cloudflare
Mar 19, 2025 · 35:36
Shawn Wang hosts Sunil Pai and Rita Kozlov to discuss Cloudflare's new Agents product, which uses Durable Objects to provide a scalable, stateful runtime for building AI agents. Sunil built an initial prototype in two weeks, which Rita helped polish into a full SDK and starter kit. They demo a chat agent with persistent state, human-in-the-loop confirmation, and built-in scheduling via cron, all running on Durable Objects without Kubernetes. The conversation covers local-first syncing (Durable Objects as always-on sync clients), the need for observability across millions of agents, and excitement about MCP for easy integrations. Rita teases upcoming "durable object enabled containers" to bridge long-running and CPU-heavy workloads, and a new browser rendering REST API launching the same day.

Browserbase: Browser Infrastructure For Your AI Agents
Feb 28, 2025 · 1:01:33
Paul Klein IV, CEO of Browserbase, argues that headless browser infrastructure is a critical primitive for AI agents to automate the web. Browserbase solves the hard problem of running thousands of browsers in the cloud—too big for Lambda, requiring Firecracker microVMs—and exposes APIs via its open-source framework Stagehand (act, extract, observe). It handles proxies, CAPTCHA solving, and offers a live view iframe for human-in-the-loop control. Primary use cases include browser automation and web scraping as a heavy-hitter renderer when simpler methods fail. Paul explains his choice to go solo founder and how Browserbase's in-person, 10–5 culture enables fast execution. He predicts the future of software will involve software acting on other software via browsers.

Truly Serverless Infra for AI Engineers - with Erik Bernhardsson of Modal
Feb 19, 2024 · 1:08:58
Erik Bernhardsson, creator of Annoy and Luigi, founded Modal to build a 'postmodern data stack' with a self-revisioning runtime that eliminates container cold starts and lets developers attach GPUs with a Python decorator. His serverless platform can fan out to thousands of GPUs within seconds, becoming a natural fit for GenAI workloads like Stable Diffusion and fine-tuning (e.g., RAMP fine-tuning 100 models in parallel). Modal differentiates from Replicate by targeting custom models and workflows, and from Modular by offering a managed cloud service rather than licensed software. Erik argues that buying hardware is inefficient for startups and that infrastructure founders must be willing to spend years on load balancing, page faults, and DNS. He shares how his IOI Gold Medal background shapes Modal's talent culture, hiring competitive programmers for complex scheduling and bin-packing problems.
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