What's Next for AI Infrastructure with Amin Vahdat | AI Basics with Google Cloud
This Week in Startups
Jason Calacanis
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 1 May 2025
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode of AI Basics, Jason sits down with Amin Vahdat, VP of ML at Google Cloud, to unpack the mind-blowing infrastructure behind modern AI. They dive into how Google’s TPUs power massive queries, why 2025 is the “Year of Inference,” and how startups can now build what once felt impossible. From real-time agents to exponential speed gains, this is a look inside the AI engine that’s rewriting the future.
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Timestamps:
(0:00) Jason introduces today’s guest Amin Vahdat
(3:18) Data movement implications for founders and historical bandwidth perspective
(5:29) The shift to inference and AI infrastructure trends in startups and enterprises
(8:40) Evolution of productivity and potential of low-code/no-code development
(11:20) AI infrastructure pricing, cost efficiency, and historical innovation
(17:53) Google's TPU technology and infrastructure scale
(23:21) Building AI agents for startup evaluation and supervised associate agents
(26:08) Documenting decisions for AI learning and early AI agent development
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Uncover more valuable insights from AI leaders in Google Cloud's 'Future of AI: Perspectives for Startups' report. Discover what 23 AI industry leaders think about the future of AI—and how it impacts your business. Read their perspectives here: https://goo.gle/futureofai
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Check out all of the Startup Basics episodes here: https://thisweekinstartups.com/basics
Check out Google Cloud: https://cloud.google.com/
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Follow Amin:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vahdat/?trk=public_post_feed-actor-name
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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to another episode of AI basics brought to you in partnership with our friends at Google Cloud. |
| 0:10.0 | Google Cloud just published a fantastic report. |
| 0:12.7 | It's called The Future of AI Perspectives for Startups. |
| 0:15.9 | It features insights from 23 leading AI experts. |
| 0:19.4 | And today on the program, we're delighted to have Amin Vadat, |
| 0:22.3 | his VPN GM of Machine Learning and Cloud AI |
| 0:25.4 | over at Google Cloud. |
| 0:26.7 | Amin Fadat has worked on scaling the internet for decades. |
| 0:31.6 | And we're gonna talk today about TPUs, GPUs, |
| 0:35.0 | just how the infrastructure is scaling. |
| 0:38.2 | I'm in, but I wanted to do it from the application layer backwards. |
| 0:42.1 | Last night, I had my high fidelity headphones on. |
| 0:45.8 | I was listening to some groovy music, and I was like, |
| 0:48.2 | tell me more artists like Bob Dylan and Mark Knopfler, |
| 0:52.0 | give me an analysis by decade. |
| 0:54.1 | And I realized I had sent Google |
| 0:57.1 | Gemini's deep research to do essentially what would have been like a PhD, you know, |
| 1:04.1 | thesis. Yes. And it returned it. And I would have never known about this music. My God, |
| 1:09.8 | the joy that that gave me finding new artists. |
| 1:12.5 | And this is a silly example. |
| 1:14.4 | But when I clicked on, like, show your work and I watched it work, I was astounded at how many |
| 1:22.1 | threads were fired at once. |
... |
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