Erik Bernhardsson, the CEO and co-founder of Modal Labs, joins Tristan to talk about Gen AI, the lack of GPUs, the future of cloud computing, and egress fees. They also discuss whether the job title of data engineer is something we should want more or less of in the future. Erik's not afraid of a spicy take, so this is a fun one.  For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.

ABOUT THE TALK: In this talk, Erik Bernhardsson will share how Modal starts 1000s of large containers in seconds, and what they had to do under the surface to build this. This includes a custom file system written in Rust, their own container runtime, and their own container image builder. This talk will give you an idea of how containers work along with some of the low-level Linux details underneath. We'll also talk about many infrastructure tools hold data teams back, and why they deserve faster and better tools.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Erik Bernhardsson is the founder and CEO of Modal, which is an infrastructure provider for data teams. Before Modal, Erik was the CTO at Better for six years, and previously spent seven years at Spotify, building the music recommendation system and running data teams.

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Erik Bernhardsson spent six years at Spotify, where he contributed to the first version of the music recommendation system. After a stint as CTO at Better.com, he's now working on building new infrastructure tooling for data teams. In this wide-ranging conversation with Tristan & Julia, Erik dives into the nuts and bolts of Spotify's recommendation algorithm, (paradoxically) why you should rarely need to use ML, and the fundamental infrastructure challenges that drag down the productivity of data teams. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.