Durable Execution and the Infrastructure Powering AI Agents

About this episode

The episode discusses the infrastructure behind AI agents, focusing on durable execution and its implications for state management and distributed systems.

Raghu Raghuram, Managing Partner at a16z, and Sarah Wang, General Partner at a16z, speak with Samar Abbas, CEO of Temporal, about how durable execution became the infrastructure layer behind some of the world’s most widely used AI agents. They cover why long-running agents require state management and recoverability, how Temporal powers OpenAI’s Codex and Snap’s Story processing, and why the shift from interactive to background agents is creating distributed systems challenges at a scale that didn’t exist two years ago.

People in this episode

Hosts: Raghu Raghuram, Sarah Wang

Guest: Samar Abbas

Topics covered

• durable execution
• AI agents
• state management
• recoverability
• distributed systems
• infrastructure

Keywords

• durable execution
• AI infrastructure
• state management
• OpenAI Codex
• Snap Story processing
• background agents
• distributed systems challenges

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Temporal, OpenAI, Snap

Products: Codex, Story

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