Why AI Infrastructure must evolve for Agent Experience — Akshat Bubna, Modal CTO
About this episode
The episode discusses the evolution of AI infrastructure to better support agent experiences, featuring insights from Modal's CTO Akshat Bubna.
We’ve been running a bit of an Agent Cloud series surveying all the top inference/compute/cloud providers, from Databricks to Daytona to Railway and, even further back, E2B , but we’re excited to conclude this series returning to Modal, which has just raised a monster $355M Series C . The cloud was built for developers. But agents are now changing that. The old infra stack was designed for a human who could read docs, reason through YAML, and understand dashboards to figure out what they need when something broke. While this was painful for developers, it worked since they could fill in missing context in their heads. However, agents don’t have that luxury. Now in this new era of agents, everything has to be tighter. They need a place to write code, run it, inspect the output, change the environment, debug failures, and try again. Fast iteration and feedback loops with all the necessary context are crucial for agents to operate properly. Furthermore, sandboxes are a clear representation of this shift as agents can easily spin up isolated environments. This programmatic infra even extends to research: Two years ago, we were one of the first to cover Modal with CEO Erik…
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