Latest Interviews
Showing 1–5 of 5 interview transcripts.
Clear all filters- Stanford Online56 min
Stanford MS&E435 Economics of the AI Supercycle | Spring 2026 | The GPU Economy
Sunny Madra, Brad Gerstner, Apoorv Agrawal
Brad Gerstner of Altimeter Capital and Grok co-founder Sonny Maduro outline a transformative shift where AI distribution costs are now compute-intensive, driving the integration of deterministic architecture with Nvidia's GPU ecosystem to accelerate inference. This strategic fusion, which led to Nvidia's $20 billion acquisition of Grok, enables a 2.5x increase in token generation while addressing critical power and memory constraints to support the transition from chat-based tools to autonomous agents. As the industry approaches Artificial General Intelligence faster than anticipated, the convergence of these hardware innovations and emerging regulatory frameworks aims to redefine global economic output and the future value of human labor.
- Stanford Online49 min
Stanford MS&E435 Economics of the AI Supercycle | Spring 2026 | Applications, Coding AI
Guillermo Rauch, Apoorv Agrawal
Vercel, a $9.3 billion infrastructure firm founded by Guillermo Rauch, is pivoting its business model from standard web pages to "agentic infrastructure" to support the exponential growth of AI coding agents and token-based consumption. The company leverages a full-stack approach anchored in open source frameworks like Next.js, enabling enterprises such as Meta and Notion to deploy self-driving cloud capabilities that automate software configuration and security. This strategic shift, which has driven a threefold growth rate since October 2024, positions Vercel as the dominant platform for high-velocity, agent-generated code while redefining industry pricing and deployment standards.
- Stanford Online49 min
Stanford MS&E435 Economics of the AI Supercycle | Spring 2026 | Applications, Applied AI
Tuhin Srivastava, Apoorv Agrawal, Doohan
Base10, led by CEO Toohin, provides a managed inference infrastructure that powers over 30 trillion tokens daily by aggregating 18 clouds to optimize costs for custom open-source AI models. The company differentiates itself from hyperscalers by abstracting complex hardware management and enabling customers to post-train proprietary models, a strategy driven by a thesis that GPU scarcity will remain permanent as agentic demand grows exponentially. With a projected capital expenditure of $7 billion to secure 150,000 B200 equivalents, Base10 aims to industrialize AI deployment through modular data centers and a transition from compute markup to token-based pricing.
- Stanford Online46 min
Stanford MS&E435 Economics of the AI Supercycle | Spring 2026 | Infrastructure, Capstone Case
Former Intel CTO Kati Katti, now at OpenAI, details the organization's aggressive pursuit of 30 gigawatts of compute capacity to support a future dominated by complex agentic workloads and massive inference demands. This strategy involves overcoming severe supply chain bottlenecks and grid constraints through specialized infrastructure like nuclear power and Cerebras accelerators while prioritizing gigawatt-scale deployment over fragmented edge solutions. Katti predicts the AI value chain will eventually shift from hardware foundations to application-layer outcomes, as the industry races to solve the critical shortage of logic and memory fabrication capacity.
- Stanford Online48 min
Stanford MS&E435 Economics of the AI Supercycle | Spring 2026 | Enterprise Internal Knowledge
Stanford graduate and Applied Compute CEO Yash Patil explains how the AI industry is shifting from general pre-training to specialized post-training on proprietary data to solve enterprise bottlenecks. He argues that while frontier models like OpenAI's O1 leverage test-time compute, future progress depends on continual learning from sparse, real-world rewards and deterministic environments like software coding. Patil concludes with a bullish outlook on compute hardware while warning that pure data-selling businesses will fail as synthetic generation and robotics become the new differentiators.