Outset Capital's Ali Rohde and Kanjun Qiu interview @anyscale CEO, Robert Nishihara.

This fireside chat is part of our 'Thursday Nights in AI" series, co-hosted by Outset Capital and Imbue.

Join our upcoming events! Full list here: https://www.outsetcapital.com/thursda...

About Outset: Outset Capital is led by Ali Rohde, Kanjun Qiu, and Josh Albrecht — AI practitioners investing in AI, deeptech, and the future of work. We back companies at the outset and love to be the first check in.

About Imbue: Imbue is an AI research company aiming to rekindle the dream of the personal computer—by creating practical AI agents that can accomplish larger goals and safely work for us in the real world. They are hiring! https://imbue.com/careers

About Anyscale: First there was Ray, an open source project from the UC Berkeley RISELab. Ray came out of their experience with the scaling challenges around machine learning and AI. From there, they built a fully managed platform for Ray to make the toughest problems in distributed computing easier for developers. That’s Anyscale.

Learn more about Anyscale: https://www.anyscale.com/
Learn more about Robert: http://www.robertnishihara.com/

00:00 Intro
01:18 Robert's founder journey
04:42 Difference between Anyscale and Ray
05:43 On what kinds of open-source projects make good business
08:17 How the AI boom changed Anyscale
10:00 Anyscale's new LLM API
11:05 How enterprise companies use Anyscale
12:50 How startups use Anyscale
13:35 Are big tech companies incorporating AI just to be included in the hype?
15:29 Anyscale and autonomous AI agents
17:20 Anyscale Endpoints and Anyscale Private Endpoints
18:04 Why companies don't want to give their data to OpenAI
19:45 Anyscale is the lowest price point on the market
20:40 Anyscale's new LLM-powered features
22:36 Open-source vs. closed source
23:24 Future of AI
24:24 Did Robert's vision for Anyscale come true?
27:12 "Under-hyped" fields in AI
28:32 How Robert is keeping up with advancements in AI
29:45 Q&A
29:59 Impact of GPU scarcity
31:49 NVIDIA monopoly
34:14 Looking back, will you still open-source Ray?
37:37 Conversion rate from Ray to Anyscale
39:00 Databricks: competitor or partner?
39:43 What layers of stack should an AI product have on Day 1?
40:48 What compute is more needed in the future: training or inference?