stephen balaban

This is the moment @OxideComputer was built for.

Seven years ago, Eclipse backed a vision from @sdtuck and @bcantrill most thought was suicide.

Today, AI is driving unprecedented compute demand, and enterprises are rethinking what they own vs. rent.

They nailed it.

Oxide's growth has been unlike anything I have ever seen.

Watching this team achieve the seemingly impossible, time and again, across engineering, supply chain, sales, finance, and beyond while scaling at an unprecedented pace has been one of the great privileges of my career.

@EclipseVentures is proud to lead Oxide's $445M Series D

This chart in particular is incredible.

This is 100% me calling my friends, as a 40-year old man, to come back to WoW Forever.

1/ Better robot models come from better data.

That takes two things: hardware that captures it fully, and tooling that turns it into training signal.

We built the first. Today, @GroundedSI launches the second: Grounded API. Access both hardware + API ↓

Everyone talks about shenzhen speed, but holy moly the hospitality here is on another level.

I have never consumed so much tea as I have done today.

More productive AI capacity from the power already available.

In a proof of concept, @LambdaAPI used NVIDIA DSX MaxLPS to run 19 nodes within the power budget of a 16-node baseline, delivering 24% more token throughput and 23% higher performance per watt.

Read the success story ➡️ nvda.ws/3VvR1fi

Since I was passing through anyway, I decided to stop by an AI data center. This is the QTS Campus outside of Richmond, VA, which is a 240 MW facility.

Honestly? Pretty quiet compared to what I was expecting. Noise profile was firmly in the mid-range (no high-pitch noise, very subdued low-end if present) and much quieter than the road I was on the side of (you can hear a car approaching at the very end of the clip and it quickly drowned out the building).

Steve Jobs picks up an iBook off the table causing the crowd to clap and cheer, then puts it through a hula hoop (1999)

so beautiful. 3d engine is experiencing the same c++ to parameter transition like fsd in last few years.

so it turns out that @stephenbalaban (Co-Founder and CTO of @LambdaAPI) and i have been mutuals on x (best friends) for years so it was amazing to finally properly hang out.
we covered:
- what it was like to be so early
- the future biggest owners of compute
- is jalapeño green inspired by NVIDIA green?
- data center misinformation

- lambda the overnight success
- Imagine doing the AI thing in 2012
- We don’t name companies like “Tumblr” and “Dribbble” anymore
- @squirtle_says and @deepdishenjoyer mentioned
- What it felt like to be so early to AI
- They used to say that the first true AGIs will be stock market trading AIs
- People were talking about an AI bubble in 2017 and 2018
- Open source vs closed source
- What happens if the Chinese models start making money
- @elonmusk and truth seeking being the highest goal for grok
- The push to own hardware and AI companies becoming power companies
- The pushback against data centers
- The prosperity that will come from the data center buildout

Steve Jobs really pulled a reality distortion field to poach Tim Cook from Compaq (in 1998, it was worth $30B+ to Apple’s $3B).

All of Cook’s friends and advisors told him not to join almost-bankrupt Apple.

Cook says it took Jobs one meeting to convince him:

“I had gotten a call several times from the search people that [Jobs] had employed, and I kept saying no.

I was happy at Compaq — or thought I was — and they were persistent.

So, I finally thought, ‘you know, I’m going to go out and take the meeting. Steve created the whole industry that I’m in. I’d love the meeting.’ […]

All of a sudden, he’s talking about his strategy and his vision and what he was doing.

He was going 100% into consumer when everybody else in the industry had decided you couldn’t make any money in consumer. They were headed to servers and storage and the enterprise. […]

I always thought following the herd was a bad idea.

He showed me a bit of the design to get me interested [of what later would be called the iMac].

The way that he talked and the chemistry. I could tell I could work with him.

I looked at the problems Apple had and I thought ‘you know, I can make a contribution here’ and working with [Jobs would be] the privilege of a lifetime.

All of a sudden I thought, ‘I’m doing it. I’m going for it.’

You hear this voice in your ear that says, ‘Go west, young man, go west.’

[The move to Apple] didn’t make sense. And yet my gut said ‘go for it’ and I listened to my gut.

There was literally no one around me that was advising me to do it.”

In March 1998, Cook joined Apple as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Operations on a $400k base salary (and a $500k signing bonus).

He was 37. Incredible gut call.

***

Full episode here from 2014: youtu.be/u9Sy3qwthCw

GPU World: A story competition from Neal Stephenson, Gwern, and me.

The AI future is unevenly distributed. What would the world look like with AI broadly diffused, such as if we had one GPU per person?

1000-5000 words, fiction or non-fiction.

$100K in total prizes.

gpuworld.org

> Person who claims that data centers are ugly, ruin the landscape, and are noisy.
> I say they're quiet light industrial buildings.
> They say I'm wrong and are worried about a data center going up in their area.
> I look into it.
> It's already a data center.

I really strongly encourage people to search for "Data Center" on Google maps and drive to their nearest one, because there already is one near you that you didn't know about, see how quiet it is after construction, then use that data center to post on Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram about what they saw there.

Greco-Deco data centers

Data center being proposed for this spot in my area. Currently proceeding through the permitting process.

You would never try to put a power plant in this many backyards.