On this episode of Alexa’s Input (AI), I sit down with Emilio Andere, co-founder and CEO of Wafer, to talk about the future of AI infrastructure, inference optimization, and the economics driving the AI compute race.

We discuss:

• why “intelligence per watt” may become one of the defining metrics of the AI era
• the current GPU and accelerator landscape across NVIDIA, AMD, TPUs, and emerging hardware startups
• why software optimization is becoming just as important as hardware itself
• inference optimization strategies
• why AI infrastructure companies are racing up the stack

• what it’s actually like building an AI infrastructure startup today

and more!

Emilio also shares lessons from founding Wafer, thoughts on the future of open-source AI infrastructure, and why he believes optimizing intelligence itself could become one of the most important engineering problems.

General Podcast Links

Watch: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@alexa_griffith⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Read: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://alexasinput.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Listen:⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/alexagriffith/⁠⁠⁠⁠

More: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://linktr.ee/alexagriffith⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Learn more about the host at

Website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://alexagriffith.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexa-griffith/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Find out more about the guest at:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emi-andere/

Wafer Website: https://www.wafer.ai/

Wafer AI / Y Combinator Article: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/wafer

Chapters

00:00 Exploring AI Conversations and Recent Podcasts

02:14 Intelligence per Watt: A New Metric for AI

07:35 The Manifesto: Efficiency in Civilization

12:40 Founding Wafer: The Journey Begins

18:08 The GPU Hardware Landscape and Market Dynamics

23:07 AMD's Growing Presence in the GPU Market

24:07 Emerging Competitors in the AI Hardware Space

26:04 Comparing TPUs and GPUs

27:21 Acquisition and Availability of TPUs

28:33 Navigating the GPU Marketplace

30:05 Understanding Neo Cloud Economics

33:30 The AI Bubble Debate

36:25 Optimizing AI Models for Performance

44:46 Bottlenecks in AI Model Performance

48:08 Future Directions in AI Hardware Optimization

54:39 Balancing Speed and Cost in AI Performance

56:54 Kernel Arena: Benchmarking AI Performance

01:03:45 Lessons from Founding: Sales and Emotional Resilience

01:07:38 The Future of AI: Trends and Predictions

01:13:03 Outro

Keywords

AI hardware, inference optimization, intelligence per watt, GPU market, AI infrastructure, Wafer, AI bubble, TPU, GPU bottleneck, AI efficiency AI optimization, large language models, AI hardware, quantization, speculative decoding, benchmarking, AI infrastructure, model training, AI startups