S13 Bonus: The Enterprise AI Chip War: Rethinking LLM Silicon & Inference with Vasanth Mohan, Director of Product at SambaNova
episode
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical Founders
40 min
1 speaker
8 chapters
transcribed 3 hours ago
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Who is Vasanth Mohan and what is SambaNova’s mission in AI hardware?
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You're proactively building resilience across AI, cloud, and identity systems. Want to enhance your data security and management? Visit Cohesity.com slash data cloud. Cohesity. Resilience everywhere. Hello, listeners. Today, we welcome a special guest to the podcast, Vasant Mohan, Head of Developer Relations and Product Marketing at SambaNova. SambaNova is transforming AI with efficiency, security, and sovereignty driven by their relentless pursuit of intelligence and running the largest models by maximizing data flow efficiency. Vasant and I dig into some fun and heavy topics at the backbone of where the industry is going with AI inference, specifically at the hardware layer. Sath, thank you for being on the show
today. Thanks for being on CodeStory. Awesome. Excited to be here and looking forward to explaining a lot more of what's happened behind the scenes when it comes to AI infrastructure and how that really emerges for all of the agents that your audience is actively building and developing with.
Absolutely. It's such an interesting time when the industry is moving so fast and a lot of people are putting their hands to keyboard and using AI tools and using generative tools and the models and all the things out there that are improving the lives. But behind the scenes, the hardware problem, the hardware optimization is real and a lot of people don't get to see that. So I'm really excited to dive into that. Before we do, what I'd really like to do is have you tell me in the audience a little bit about you.
I lead product marketing and developer relations at Salmanova. Before that, I've been around Silicon Valley and a bunch of different startups from virtual reality to AI where I am today. And it's super interesting diving in and having been with Salmanova for the last couple of years to really dive into the hardware and infrastructure that is driving this AI revolution.
Curious about if you can tell me a little bit about Samanova and how you and the team are solving
these types of problems. Samanova has been around since 2017. So it's not new and has produced many chips in that time as a hardware company. It was co-founded by two Stanford professors partnering with a pioneer from the Sun and Oracle days. The name is Rodrigo Leone.
How does the inference profile change when moving from single‑chat responses to autonomous multi‑agent workflows?
And together, they've really come up with this innovative idea, having seen the AI space emerge. to create this chip called a reconfigurable data flow unit, RDU. And it fundamentally works very differently from GPUs in the way that it maps the hardware in a way that is much more spatially oriented to how AI operations work.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who is Vasanth Mohan and what is SambaNova’s mission in AI hardware?
0:00–4:06
2
How does the inference profile change when moving from single‑chat responses to autonomous multi‑agent workflows?
4:06–10:12
3
What latency‑budget strategies do developers use to keep multi‑agent orchestrations from timing out?
10:12–13:19
4
How do Neo‑clouds decide the optimal mix of GPUs, ASICs, and custom interconnects for fluctuating workloads?
13:19–18:27
5
What power‑distribution and cooling innovations are enabling higher inference density in data centers?
18:27–24:46
6
What real‑world friction points arise when decoupling pre‑fill and decode stages of inference?
24:46–29:39
7
How are engineering teams building dynamic routing and auto‑scaling to balance compute‑bound and memory‑bound hardware?
29:39–35:29
8
At what scale does it become economically compelling for enterprises to move from closed‑API models to self‑hosted open‑weight inference?
35:29–40:17
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical Founders
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