No Priors Ep 56 | With Baseten CEO and Co-Founder Tuhin Srivastava

Hi, listeners. Welcome to another episode of No Priors. Today, Elad and I are catching up with Tuhin Shrivastava, the CEO and co-founder of Baseten, which gives teams fast, scalable AI infrastructure, starting with inference. They're one of the players at the center of the battle heating up around AI computing. Welcome, Tuhin.

Hi. Thanks for having me. Good to see you guys.

Let's start at the beginning. For any listeners who don't know, uh, what is Baseten, and how'd you start working on it?

Baseten is a infrastructure product, so we provide fast, scalable AI infrastructure for engineering teams working with large models. Currently, we're focused on inference, and we want to do a lot more after that. But, you know, for the past, say, four and a half years actually... Oh, that's, that's a long time. For, for last four and a half years, we've been, you know, cutting our teeth and, uh, trying to build this thing. Um, I think it's been pretty rewarding over the last 12 months seeing the market kind of show up and, you know, everyone get equally excited about AI infrastructure. Um, we, we started this honestly because firstly, you know, we thought ML was pretty cool in, in 2019. We thought it, it, it was going somewhere, um, and we wanted to build a picks-and-shovels business and kind of solve the problems that we were running into. Um, I think the side note here is that I wanted to start a company with my friends.

You often say that Baseten isn't no code, it's efficient code. Like, why does that difference matter?

That wasn't always the case, I'd say. I, I, I'd say, like, you know, there was times when we had elements which were definitely a bit more no-cody. I think what, what we've learned over the last three or four years is, you know, um, code is just incredibly powerful and engineers want to write code. Even in its best form, you know, you want to build, like, really, really tight abstractions, but I think the, the ability to turn the knobs under the hood is, is very, very important, and I think no code kind of, um, makes that a lot harder. I don't think it removes it, but it makes it a lot harder. So what we, what we do is just build, um, very strong intuitive abstractions that try to make the easy things super easy and, but still make the hard things possible. So, you know, you can get a lot of value, um, really quickly. But I'll... I'd say unlike a lot of other infrastructure products that have been built over the last 10 years, we're trying t- to solve against a graduation problem, which is that, you know, that we're able to support teams as they grow and scale.

And just to sort of make it a little bit more visceral for our listeners, like, what, what are the types of applications that run on Baseten? Like, what's the scale of the platform? Do you have a favorite application?