
Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI
Hosted by Lukas Biewald
Written by a model from the transcript; not yet reviewed.
CoreWeave SVP of Product Corey Sanders joins Lukas Biewald to explain why a $41B AI-focused cloud can compete with AWS, Azure, and GCP. Sanders draws a parallel to the analytics wave that spawned Snowflake and Databricks outside the public clouds, arguing that AI training is now a business-critical, high-cost workload demanding best-in-class rather than best-in-suite. He points to specific technical differentiators: a caching layer called Lada designed to maximize GPU throughput, liquid cooling infrastructure that general-purpose data centers find hard to retrofit, and a network architecture exploiting the fact that most inference time is spent in the GPU rather than on the network.
Sanders also discusses CoreWeave's customer engagement model, where the CTO personally works in Slack channels with customers and products like Lada and Chaos originated from sitting with specific stuck customers before being productized. He argues that fungibility is the lifeblood of public clouds and that as long as value is added in quality, performance, and experience, AI infrastructure will never be truly commodity. The conversation also covers supply constraints in the GPU market and Sanders' personal approach to building a CoreWeave portal using Anthropic's API to stay close to the customer experience.
Snowflake Analogy for AI Cloudsinsight
Sanders compares the AI revolution to the analytics wave of a decade ago, arguing that business-critical, high-cost workloads drive customers to seek best-in-class solutions outside the public clouds, just as Snowflake and Databricks did for analytics.
Microsoft and Google as CoreWeave Customersinsight
Sanders confirms that Microsoft and Google are customers of CoreWeave, noting that the specialized design choices of an AI cloud make it non-fungible with general-purpose clouds.
Lada Cache for GPU Throughputstrategy
Sanders explains CoreWeave's Lada caching layer, designed to bring as much data and throughput into the GPU as possible, making the GPU the bottleneck rather than storage. He contrasts this with e-commerce workloads that need consistent writes.
Fungibility as Public Cloud Constraintinsight
Sanders argues that fungibility is the lifeblood of public clouds and that this very requirement prevents them from making the simplifying assumptions an AI-only cloud can, such as planning for liquid cooling at scale or designing caches for read-heavy GPU workloads.
Lada and Chaos Born from Customersstory
Sanders explains that CoreWeave's product ideation comes from sitting with customers who are stuck. Lada and Chaos both originated from specific customer conversations before being productized for broader use.
AI Infrastructure Will Never Be Commoditydebate
Sanders argues that as long as value is being added in operations, quality, performance, and experience, something will never be truly commodity. He notes the bar will keep rising and today's level of quality will not win workloads in two years.
Show Don't Ask for Feedbackstrategy
Sanders describes his customer feedback method: always come with what you're building and ask for reactions, rather than asking open-ended questions. He explains that customers are product users, not product owners, and open-ended questions produce unactionable noise.
The future of AI training is shaped by one constraint: keeping GPUs fed. In this episode, Lukas Biewald talks with CoreWeave SVP Corey Sanders about why general-purpose clouds start to break down under large-scale AI workloads. According to Corey, the industry is shifting toward a "Neo Cloud" model to handle the unique demands of modern models. They dive into the hardware and software stack required to maximize GPU utilization and achieve high goodput. Corey’s conclusion is clear: AI demands specialization. Connect with us here: Corey Sanders: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corey-sanders-842b72/ CoreWeave: https://www.linkedin.com/company/coreweave/ Lukas Biewald: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lbiewald/ Weights & Biases: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wandb/ (00:00) Trailer (00:57) Introduction (02:51) The Evolution of AI Workloads (06:22) Core Weave's Technological Innovations (13:58) Customer Engagement and Future Prospects (28:49) Comparing Cloud Approaches (33:50) Balancing Executive Roles and Hands-On Projects (46:44) Product Development and Customer Feedback
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