Rob Wachen

speaker

529 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 30 Jun

Rob Wachen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy · Etched - Building AI Hardware to Make Inference Faster and Cheaper - [Invest Like the Best, EP.480] · 30 Jun 2026 podcast

So that's the thing that I think is really hard to internalize because the models are just getting capable enough to do this stuff.

I thought it was really cool months ago when Cursor published that they had a bunch of coding agents build an entire browser from scratch in a week.

Totally nuts.

And that will soon happen in under an hour.

And there's going to be many of those types of things that are going to happen with these massive parallel agents all working on a given task.

We sometimes run experiments internally, and we had Codex actually get GPT-OSS running from scratch just based off of our docs completely by itself.

And it did it, I think, overnight.

We think about game selection a lot, and what we mean by that is making sure we're investing our energy in the right bets.

Because regardless of what you choose to work on, it will take tremendous effort.

And one of the things that we started with was the decision explicitly not to build an arbitrary graph compiler, not to support arbitrary PyTorch, not to support arbitrary CUDA, not to support arbitrary ONNX graphs.

But instead, we envisioned a world where there was going to be under 100 models that actually mattered, and they were all going to look very similar from the underlying mathematical perspective.

and that we were going to build primitives using physics that were going to accelerate these as much as humanly possible, and we were going to allow the most sophisticated customers to have direct access to the hardware and do whatever they want.

And that has saved us a tremendous amount of time not having to build a compiler, and that has allowed us to actually get much more performance.

And funnily enough, when we started, a lot of people dismissed this idea, and the only people that took us seriously were in high-frequency trading.

They all hate compilers too.

They all write their own kernels.

And we've had dozens of people from high-frequency trading join the team because they saw this philosophy too.

We have a saying that production is the product.

Ultimately, what matters here is we know inference is going to be the biggest market in the world.

Whoever produces the most tokens is going to be the most valuable company in the world.

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