Inferact: Building the Infrastructure That Runs Modern AI
The a16z Show
a16z
4.2 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 22 January 2026
⏱️ 44 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Our goal is to make VOLM the world's inference engine, really push the capabilities on the open source front, |
| 0:07.8 | and then build the universal inference layer. |
| 0:10.4 | That means we'll have the runtime to power any new model on new hardware for new application, |
| 0:18.3 | be able to tailor that to extreme efficiency and support all the AI workbook going forward. |
| 0:23.0 | I fundamentally believe that open source, |
| 0:25.7 | especially how VLM itself is structured, |
| 0:29.1 | is critical to the AI infrastructure in the world. |
| 0:32.9 | And what we want to do with Infraq |
| 0:35.7 | is to support, maintain, steward, and push forward the open source ecosystem. |
| 0:41.6 | It is only that VOLM win. |
| 0:44.5 | VLM becomes a standard and VLM help everybody to achieve what they need to do. |
| 0:48.9 | Then our company in the sense have the right meaning and to be able to support everybody around it. |
| 1:01.1 | What if the hardest problem in artificial intelligence isn't training smarter models, |
| 1:05.2 | but simply keeping them running? For most of the history of computing, once the system was |
| 1:09.8 | built, the hard part was over. |
| 1:11.8 | He wrote the program, pressed run, and the machine behaved predictably. |
| 1:15.8 | Even early machine learning followed that pattern. |
| 1:18.4 | Inputs were standardized, workloads were regular, the computer did its job and stopped. |
| 1:23.2 | Large language models quietly broke that assumption. |
| 1:26.4 | Every request is different. |
| 1:28.3 | Prombs can be a sentence or an entire archive. |
| 1:30.3 | Outputs can end instantly or stretch on indefinitely. |
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