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Dax Raad

Dax Raad

πŸ‘€ Speaker
820 total appearances

Appearances Over Time

Podcast Appearances

The Pragmatic Engineer
Building OpenCode with Dax Raad

the best model i mean of course frontier models are easy but then the best inference for all the open source models all that became really popular um that business is growing a ton i think a couple months ago we announced that hit 50 million uh run rate uh within like five or six months wow um and the margins there can be pretty good because open source models you can host at a decent margin that is growing like crazy uh we didn't really expect that but that's that's a big part of it

The Pragmatic Engineer
Building OpenCode with Dax Raad

The other side of it is extremely boring.

The Pragmatic Engineer
Building OpenCode with Dax Raad

If you are a company that's using open code and you have a thousand engineers, you can't just tell them all to go download open code and like add an open API key.

The Pragmatic Engineer
Building OpenCode with Dax Raad

You need some kind of control plane to like set up all the providers, permissions, budget controls, rate limits.

The Pragmatic Engineer
Building OpenCode with Dax Raad

So we have a product there.

The Pragmatic Engineer
Building OpenCode with Dax Raad

we're gonna make that publicly available soon but right now it's just been like enterprise deployed uh so just if you're a company that's using open code at scale you need some administrative software to run it you can't practically use open code at scale without something like that that's also open source but you know most people just pay for our hosted version uh the other thing is

The Pragmatic Engineer
Building OpenCode with Dax Raad

I think the time has finally come where people are looking at how much they're spending on LLM.

The Pragmatic Engineer
Building OpenCode with Dax Raad

And they're like, what are we doing?

The Pragmatic Engineer
Building OpenCode with Dax Raad

Are we actually getting anything anymore done?

The Pragmatic Engineer
Building OpenCode with Dax Raad

So companies are now looking at their costs and trying to figure out how to optimize it a little bit.

The Pragmatic Engineer
Building OpenCode with Dax Raad

It's great timing because open source models are now very competitive.

The Pragmatic Engineer
Building OpenCode with Dax Raad

They are 10x cheaper.

The Pragmatic Engineer
Building OpenCode with Dax Raad

Blending that in and having good inference for open source models is becoming a part of our business as well.

The Pragmatic Engineer
Building OpenCode with Dax Raad

So these big companies, you know, they need the control plane, but then we kind of just give them inference access as well to these other models.

The Pragmatic Engineer
Building OpenCode with Dax Raad

And they end up just kind of naturally starting to use it.

The Pragmatic Engineer
Building OpenCode with Dax Raad

If that ends up being a main part of our business, we might stop charging for the control plane itself and just charge for the inference.

The Pragmatic Engineer
Building OpenCode with Dax Raad

Yeah, so I think this is a, it's kind of, there are different parts of the business.

The Pragmatic Engineer
Building OpenCode with Dax Raad

So if you look at the pure inference part of a business, if you think about what's the floor on the cost, the floor is a cost of electricity.

The Pragmatic Engineer
Building OpenCode with Dax Raad

There's a capital cost to acquire the hardware.

The Pragmatic Engineer
Building OpenCode with Dax Raad

Once you have it to deliver a token, the cheapest it can get is the electricity to power it.