Cloud Decentralization

“Cornell really had a vision of creating a cloud where you can take this compute and actually deliver a similar product, if not better than what we have with Amazon. And we really took that idea and we implemented the first ever, or we built the first ever supercloud. I mean, no one actually built supercloud before us. And we took it one step further. We made it open source. We made it decentralized.” — 00:03:10

“We noticed that cloud tooling has been not only getting extremely complicated, it’s getting extremely pricey… we prophesied saying that, look, if the cloud continues the way it is going, it’s going to lead to the massive reliability issues, massive cost issues, like we see today. I mean, people complain about AWS going down every other month… And we predicted that. We wrote a white paper. We published that in 2017.” — 00:01:40

“We have fair pricing and transparent pricing for electricity and water and all the commodities that we use and depend on — why not have the same mechanism for the cloud? And we don’t want a state actor to enforce that, but rather a free market to enforce it. That’s the thesis of decentralized compute.” — 02:21:38

“For the first time, we saw cloud no longer works in your best interest, but rather gives compute to people they think are going to be successful… one might say — this is speculation — Amazon overwhelmingly supporting Anthropic might have resulted in their success. So who’s to say cloud companies are not picking winners and losers?” — 02:20:14

“There will come a point where cloud consumption outpaces the supply for the compute… at the rate at which the data was growing, there is no single company in the world that can catch up and scale. So the obvious answer is a grid model… in a peer-to-peer manner where there is compute everywhere.” — 00:26:13

“If you ask four years from now: world will be energy rich, dollar strong compared to other fiats… GDP will be much higher growth, employment will be significantly lower… and decentralization will take a more center stage, because moratoriums on data centers and all these will start kicking in… the only way to scale will be decentralized systems.” — 01:04:31

“You would see a lot of these financials of a lot of SaaS companies — on an average, about 50%, every half of every dollar you pay was going to a cloud provider for the services. And in some cases like Asana… about 60 to 70%… I think like Netflix was 70%… and the margins were 60, 70% for these cloud providers… The access to the cloud should be open, and the software that governs cloud should be open. It should be built by the people that use it.” — 00:05:46

“Every company will have their own AI cloud. And that’s a prediction I made a long time ago, and that prediction still stands true today… The obvious answer is to own your compute.” — 00:13:40

“Akash is a supercloud. Supercloud is a cloud of clouds… I would imagine Google and Amazon and Azure of the world will become part of Akash Network at some point.” — 00:12:55

“Akash is a decentralized super cloud. What that means is it is a cloud network where the compute comes from places that normally cloud providers don’t offer. Places like homes, buildings, small buildings. Pretty much anywhere there’s compute can be contributed to Akash network for the greater good.” — 00:37:18

“That’s the core thesis of Akash Network is to, instead of concentrating this compute power in small places, let’s spread across as much as possible. For that, just yesterday, we reached 10 billion tokens a day. That’s quite a lot. It’s more than some of the centralized players.” — 00:40:41