Distributed Computing podcasts
Episodes
Podcast episode
Why You Can't Just Rent 1,000 GPUs | Charles Frye (Modal)
Published Sep 1, 2026 · 1h 3m
Charles Frye of Modal examines the infrastructure constraints behind large-scale AI research. With Ravid Shwartz Ziv and Allen Roush, he discusses underused hardware, saturated resources, sharing GPU capacity and deciding when to train a model. The conversation also covers inference and speculative decoding, hardware economics, virtualization and the security boundaries around agents and open models. Hosted by Ravid Shwartz Ziv and Allen Roush. Watch the full conversation on the publisher’s YouTube channel.
Hosted by Ravid Shwartz Ziv, Allen Roush
Video available
The Information Bottleneck
Podcast episode
How to Turn Research Into Billion-Dollar Companies, with Ion Stoica
Published Jul 16, 2026 · 49m
Berkeley professor Ion Stoica discusses how research software becomes useful infrastructure and, sometimes, a company. The conversation draws on systems projects and companies associated with his laboratory to examine adoption, maintenance and the role of students. It also covers the complexity of the AI software stack, GPU utilization, coding agents in distributed systems, reward design and regulating outcomes. Hosted by Ravid Shwartz Ziv and Allen Roush. Watch the full conversation on the publisher’s YouTube channel.
Hosted by Ravid Shwartz Ziv, Allen Roush
Video available
The Information Bottleneck
Podcast episode
Infrastructure for AI at Scale - With Benny Chen (Fireworks AI)
Published Jun 24, 2026 · 1h 6m
Fireworks AI co-founder Benny Chen explains the infrastructure required to serve machine-learning models at scale, from GPU procurement and kernels to runtimes and request routing. He discusses power constraints, hardware utilization, mixture-of-experts models, quantization, reinforcement-learning efficiency and speculative decoding. The conversation also covers distributed training across data centres, sparse autoencoders, the constraints on open-source interpretability research, and the relationship between open models and compute availability. Hosted by Ravid Shwartz Ziv and Allen Roush; the full conversation is available on YouTube.
Hosted by Ravid Shwartz Ziv, Allen Roush
Video available
The Information Bottleneck
No more episodes.