Building Predibase: AI, Open-Source, and Commercialization with Dev Rishi and Travis Addair

Madrona Partner Vivek Ramaswami hosts Dev Rishi and Travis Addair, co-founders of 2023 IA40 Rising Star, Predibase. Predibase is a platform for developers to easily fine-tune and serve any open-source model. They recently released LoRA Land, a collection of 25 highly-performant open-source fine-tuned models, and launched open-source LoRA eXchange, or LoRAX, which allows users to pack hundreds of task-specific models into a single GPU.

In this episode, Dev and Travis share their perspective on what it takes to commercialize open-source projects, how to build a product your customers actually want, and how to differentiate in a very noisy AI infrastructure market. This is a must-listen for anyone building an AI. Full Transcript: https://www.madrona.com/predibase-ai-open-source-commercialization

Chapters

(00:00) Introduction (01:29) The Founding Story of Predibase (04:03) Vision and Evolution of Predibase (06:23) Predibase's Response to the ChatGPT Hype (11:26) Commercializing Open-Source Projects (17:37) Bigger Isn't Always Better - LLMs (24:10) Challenges and Solutions in AI Infrastructure (30:47) Predibase's Unique Approach and Future Outlook (34:11) Over-Hyped vs. Under-Hyped in AI (38:37) Advice for First-Time Founders