Luis Ceze on Open Source Business Models and OctoML

Luis Ceze, CEO of OctoML, speaks about the creation of the Apache TVM at the University of Washington, how they’ve built a vibrant community around the open source project, and how bringing a commercial product to market is key to a sustainable open source ecosystem. Also catch Luis sharing a sneak preview of the Octomizer, a fully managed software-as-a-service that you can use to optimize, benchmark, and package your machine learning models for a number of different hardware platforms and language runtimes.

Episode Notes

(00:19) Intro

(00:51) Creation of Apache TVM at University of Washington

(2:41) Early members of the community

(3:08) The customer pain

(3:47) The community today

(4:16) Two groups of users: hardware vendors and machine learning data scientists and engineers

(5:28) Awareness among machine learning data scientists (integration with popular frameworks, effectiveness with models that customers care about, connect with adjacent communities)

(6:46) Common use cases and customer needs (latency, throughput per dollar, hardware coverage, operator coverage)

(9:59) Building a commercial product with a committed open source project

(12:05) Using the Octomizer

(13:22) Evaluating building vs. buying

(14:26) Ideas for business models around open source software

(16:04) Network effects

(17:34) Connecting different pursuits

(18:55) Challenges of building a business around an open source project

(20:01) What not to do!

(21:05) Community really likes the commercialization (‘this is serious!’)