Brian Venturo and Brannin McBee (CoreWeave) on Building an Industrial Scale GPU Cloud (EP.366)

CoreWeave‘s Brian Venturo (CTO) and Brannin McBee (CSO) return to On The Brink for a discussion of their journey through the merge and beyond. In this episode: 

  • Are they relieved that the merge finally happened?
  • Will there be some form of non-Bitcoin PoW in the future?
  • Could Ethereum conceivably return to PoW?
  • The effect of PoS on ETH’s censor resistance
  • What quantity of ETH miners shifted to other PoW chains and what portion went elsewhere?
  • What is the best use of capital for former ETH miners now?
  • Did the merge really reduce global electricity consumption by 0.2%?
  • Brannin’s estimate for precise electricity reduction from the merge
  • How feasible is it for former ETH miners to get into GPU clouds?
  • How Core Weave built their cloud product
  • What it takes to be competitive in the high performance computing sector
  • Why the generalized providers of cloud can’t just win when it comes to rendering and ML/AI
  • Why the HPC market is exploding right now
  • How open source communities behind text and image models contributed to the explosion in use cases
  • The importance of Stable Diffusion versus Open AI
  • The explosive growth of Stable Diffusion and Stability AI
  • How the growth in infrastructure contributed to the emergence of these newer image models
  • New directions in AI models like video creation
  • Will generative AI be attacked by environmentalists?
  • Can cloud data centers handle interruptible loads like Bitcoin miners can?
  • How industrial compute will play a role in emerging metaverses
  • Use cases Brannin and Brian are excited about
  • Why hardware is actually a constraint to the number of metaverse users today

Learn more about CoreWeave here.

Check out this episode!