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
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 693 Ratings
🗓️ 24 February 2025
⏱️ 73 minutes
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Summary
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
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The thing with Nvidia is that they spend a lot of energy making you care about stuff you shouldn't care about. |
| 0:05.5 | And they were very successful. Like, who gives a shit about CUDA? |
| 0:08.3 | Open AI is amazing, but it's not their compute. |
| 0:11.0 | Ultimately, if you don't own your compute, you're starting with something at your ankle. |
| 0:15.0 | In five years, I would say 95% in France, 5% training. |
| 0:20.0 | You have the products, the data, data and the compute who has all three |
| 0:22.8 | Google has like Android Google Docs they have everything they can sprinkle everywhere this is |
| 0:27.8 | the sleeping giant in my mind this is 20 VC with me harry stebbings and our show with jonathan |
| 0:34.2 | ross at grok went so well last week, but I had so many more questions |
| 0:38.9 | on two things, the future of chips and the future of inference. So today we dig deep on both, |
| 0:45.3 | and there's no one better to join me than Steve Morin. Steve is the founder of ZML, a next |
| 0:50.1 | generation inference engine enabling peak performance on a wide range of chips. |
| 0:55.6 | Literally the perfect speaker for this topic. |
| 0:58.7 | And this was a super nerdy show. |
| 1:00.9 | It was probably the most information dense episode we've done in a long time. |
| 1:04.7 | So do slow it down, pause it, get a notebook out. |
| 1:07.9 | But wow, there is so much gold in this one. |
| 1:10.7 | But before we dive in today, turning your back of a napkin idea into a billion-dollar startup |
| 1:16.1 | requires countless hours of collaboration and teamwork. |
| 1:19.8 | It can be really difficult to build a team that's aligned on everything from values to |
| 1:24.0 | workflow, but that's exactly what Coda was made to do. |
| 1:27.1 | Coda is an all-in-one |
... |
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