The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Why Google Will Win the AI Arms Race & OpenAI Will Not | NVIDIA vs AMD: Who Wins and Why | The Future of Inference vs Training | The Economics of Compute & Why To Win You Must Have Product, Data & Compute with Steeve Morin @ ZML
24 Feb 2025
Steeve Morin is the Founder & CEO @ ZML, a next-generation inference engine enabling peak performance on a wide range of chips. Prior to founding ZML, Steeve was the VP Engineering at Zenly for 7 years leading eng to millions of users and an acquisition by Snap. In Today’s Episode We Discuss: 04:17 How Will Inference Change and Evolve Over the Next 5 Years 09:17 Challenges and Innovations in AI Hardware 15:38 The Economics of AI Compute 18:01 Training vs. Inference: Infrastructure Needs 25:08 The Future of AI Chips and Market Dynamics 34:43 Nvidia's Market Position and Competitors 38:18 Challenges of Incremental Gains in the Market 39:12 The Zero Buy-In Strategy 39:34 Switching Between Compute Providers 40:40 The Importance of a Top-Down Strategy for Microsoft and Google 41:42 Microsoft's Strategy with AMD 45:50 Data Center Investments and Training 46:40 How to Succeed in AI: The Triangle of Products, Data, and Compute 48:25 Scaling Laws and Model Efficiency 49:52 Future of AI Models and Architectures 57:08 Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) 01:00:52 Why OpenAI’s Position is Not as Strong as People Think 01:06:47 Challenges in AI Hardware Supply
Full Episode
The thing with Nvidia is that they spend a lot of energy making you care about stuff you shouldn't care about. And they were very successful. Like, who gives a shit about CUDA? OpenAI is amazing, but it's not their compute. Ultimately, if you don't own your compute, you're starting with something at your ankle. In five years, I would say 95% inference, 5% training.
You have the products, the data, and the compute. Who has all three? Google has, like, Android, Google Docs. They have everything. They can sprinkle everywhere. This is the sleeping giant in my mind.
This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and our show with Jonathan Ross at Grok went so well last week, but I had so many more questions on two things, the future of chips and the future of inference. So today we dig deep on both, and there's no one better to join me than Steve Morin.
Steve is the founder of ZML, a next generation inference engine, enabling peak performance on a wide range of chips. Literally the perfect speaker for this topic. And this was a super nerdy show. It was probably the most information dense episode we've done in a long time. So do slow it down, pause it, get a notebook out. But wow, there is so much gold in this one.
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