Former sysadmin and storage consultant, present cat herder for Tech Field Day, future old man shouting “on-premises” at clouds. I talk to cameras a lot.
Tom Hollingsworth and I had a great briefing with Anyscale this week - a company I became aware of due to their connection with Ray, the widely-used open source AI platform. Anyscale is focused on enabling AI development on the software side by commercializing the open-source Ray platform. They're not focused only on training large generative AI models, they're building a versatile platform that supports multiple AI models, allowing businesses to scale across various workloads, including training, online inferencing, and offline batch processing. Customers typically use hardware in the cloud, often seeking to maximize their committed spend with major hyperscalers like AWS and GCP. While most of their deployments are on NVIDIA GPUs, Anyscale maintains a hardware-agnostic approach, supporting a broad array of compute resources. Their platform is primarily adopted by AI platform teams within organizations, who are responsible for delivering AI capabilities to internal users such as data scientists. These teams prioritize performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency, while also focusing on accelerating developer velocity through the creation of internal AI tooling and platforms. Anyscale’s differentiation lies in the deep integration and optimization of Ray, which serves as the backbone of their platform. They have invested significantly in enhancing Ray's performance, reliability, and scalability, making it the go-to standard for scaling AI workloads. Anyscale also offers purpose-built developer tools such as distributed debugging and log viewing, as well as integrated workspaces and notebooks to streamline the development process. Their managed services further add value by providing enterprise-level security and governance features. Additionally, Anyscale has developed extensive integrations with the existing tech stacks of their customers, including popular tools like Weights & Biases. As generative AI continues to gain traction, Anyscale is positioning itself to empower a broader range of businesses, beyond those training the largest models, to leverage AI through a scalable and efficient platform. It's incredible to learn from people like Robert Nishihara in briefings like this for The Futurum Group, and I thank Matthew Connor and the team for setting this up!
Chief Technology Advisor - The Futurum Group
4moDeveloper experience is an essential part of the productization of AI. Having someone abstract these projects to make them consumable by AI developers helps ensure accessibility for bringing new developers on projects.