Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:18:41 · Aaron Epstein, Jeffrey Morgan
[00:18:41] S1: your tokens will be going through the open models. [00:18:42] S0: Right, which will enable a whole bunch of use cases on top, because you have this abundance of tokens. You're not thinking about taking away token access from your team, you're giving more and more access. I think for the hardest tasks, that's reserved for these frontier labs, where a lot of the best researchers are. And then from there, there's a whole bunch of problems in the middle, where maybe it's a combination of open and closed models working together. But I think the steady state is that most of the models are open. [00:19:07] S1: It's kind of an interesting idea, because as the models get more powerful, ideally you just wanna delegate to your smartest model to figure out when to go to an open model. But the labs who are in the models presumably don't want [00:19:19] S0: that. And I think, look, I think that all the labs are aligned in many ways to one thing, which is how do you serve the customer? And I think it will be up to the customer to decide. If I have a router where some of the scheduling and harder orchestration happens through frontier model, so be it. But a lot of the kind of line item work can happen through open models and the collaboration of the two together. I think we've seen a ton of projects, whether it's from Sakana AI or Open Router, that have combined the two and seen really good results.
00:19:19 · Jeffrey Morgan, Jared Friedman
[00:19:19] S0: that. And I think, look, I think that all the labs are aligned in many ways to one thing, which is how do you serve the customer? And I think it will be up to the customer to decide. If I have a router where some of the scheduling and harder orchestration happens through frontier model, so be it. But a lot of the kind of line item work can happen through open models and the collaboration of the two together. I think we've seen a ton of projects, whether it's from Sakana AI or Open Router, that have combined the two and seen really good results. [00:19:47] S3: This is not too dissimilar from a human organization, right? Like you have a law firm. There's like a partner, and then there's like a bunch of associates. And like the partner farms out the work to the associates, right? It's like the same. [00:19:59] S0: We saw the same thing with cloud computing, where it was really a blend of proprietary software, some of them provided by the cloud providers themselves. For example, AWS had DynamoDB, which was kind of their proprietary scale out database. But then a lot of customers use that in conjunction with PostgresDB. And in the end, what we see is customers will use a combination of the two.
00:19:59 · Jeffrey Morgan, Harj Taggar, Jared Friedman
[00:19:59] S0: We saw the same thing with cloud computing, where it was really a blend of proprietary software, some of them provided by the cloud providers themselves. For example, AWS had DynamoDB, which was kind of their proprietary scale out database. But then a lot of customers use that in conjunction with PostgresDB. And in the end, what we see is customers will use a combination of the two. [00:20:20] S4: Think it's a very common pattern. Mean, this is also the same design for why the Apple silicon is actually more superior, the special special special accelerators for different kinds of workloads for, let's say, image processing, supposed to audio, that's a spin. Or even go way back in in in the PC era. You had, like, your standalone audio card. Right? Graphics card and all that. [00:20:41] S3: And speaking of Apple Silicon, should we talk about local models? Because you're you're in a bit of a unique position and be because you have large businesses both in cloud hosted models and locally hosted models that will run on your laptop. What are you seeing in those two worlds, and what do you
00:20:41 · Jared Friedman, Jeffrey Morgan, Garry Tan, Aaron Epstein
[00:20:41] S3: And speaking of Apple Silicon, should we talk about local models? Because you're you're in a bit of a unique position and be because you have large businesses both in cloud hosted models and locally hosted models that will run on your laptop. What are you seeing in those two worlds, and what do you [00:20:56] S0: think is gonna happen? I think it's incredibly exciting because it's similar to the closed versus open model question. It'll be a mix in our mind. And that's what we hear from customers as well, where for easier tasks, could run them locally and with lower latency and of course lower costs when it comes to the per token costs. Ultimately you're buying hardware upfront. And you'll use that in conjunction with these cloud models. What's exciting about this next generation of hardware, which we've had for a few years now, is just how good they are at running the 20,000,000,000 parameter to 40,000,000,000 parameter range of models, sometimes up to 120,000,000,000 parameters. [00:21:32] S2: Yeah. Qwen 3.838 b is now as good as OPUS 4.6 for coding. Is that right? [00:21:38] S0: That's what the benchmark showed. [00:21:40] S2: Yeah. That's wild. [00:21:40] S0: It's incredibly exciting because you can run that on not the the lowest memory MacBook, but the second lowest memory MacBook you can find from this store. So it's incredible. [00:21:50] S3: And are you seeing your users do that? [00:21:52] S1: Like, how are you [00:21:52] S3: seeing people use the local models versus the cloud hosted models for in practice?
00:21:52 · Jared Friedman, Jeffrey Morgan
[00:21:52] S3: seeing people use the local models versus the cloud hosted models for in practice? [00:21:56] S0: From the side of which models they're running, we're seeing a really solid mix of US and Chinese trained models being used for local. And we have the incredible models from the original Llama models, of course, but also the Gemma models from DeepMind. These are great choices for local. But when it comes down to use cases, coding agents by and large are most effective with the large cloud models. You're solving really hard problems, you're writing code, tests, it's really difficult versus some of the document processing workflow use cases that run extremely well locally because they don't have as difficult of a task in the end to end problem you're trying to solve. And so that's where we see this hybrid execution model where some of the easier, more straightforward tasks run locally. And then you have a router that can help decide, hey, we need to go to a large cloud model for this. And I think what that means for customers is that you're really dropping the costs even further when you're going from open models. Not just because they're cheaper to run-in the cloud, but because now you can run them effectively for free on the hardware you're buying for your business anyways. And what we're seeing ultimately from the cloud coding agent models is it is predominantly Chinese models being consumed today. And for the local models, it's a really strong blend of US, Europe,
00:23:10 · Jared Friedman, Jeffrey Morgan, Garry Tan
[00:23:10] S3: and Chinese origin models. Yeah. These two graphs are pretty stunning in comparison. Basically, for local models, The US and Chinese models are neck and neck, or like tied. And for cloud hosted models, The US is recoloring the x axis. It's 100% Chinese models. Basically, we need more US labs to make large models. That what this graph is showing? [00:23:32] S0: Effectively. And, you know, with the launch of the Nemotron Ultra model, we're seeing kind of the first wave of that, and it's really exciting. [00:23:38] S2: NVIDIA as a company is so interesting because their moat is not, like, trying to start new software businesses or sell, you know, tokens. Seem to be quite interested in just releasing a lot of open source and helping the ecosystem. And then the fact that they do that then helps them stay ahead of the game on the hardware side. [00:24:00] S0: I think so. Ultimately, NVIDIA, what's so incredible is there's helping power an ecosystem around open models, whether that's the hardware, the models. We've seen the new DGX station computers that they're working on which have I want GB 300 on your desk [00:24:17] S2: How do we get on that desk. [00:24:18] S0: That isn't deafening [00:24:20] S2: Yeah. Loud. Yeah. Do you know the price point on that thing yet? [00:24:23] S0: I don't know it off the bat. [00:24:24] S3: It's gotta be like Garry buying it. [00:24:25] S2: I know. Right? Well, I looked it up. It's... I mean, you can probably run a Frontier model for, like, I mean, very slowly for like $2.02, $300,000. Is that is that right?