20VC: Who Wins the Inference Market | Has Open-Source LLM Inference Peaked? | What Happens to the Cost of Compute | The Real Limits of Post-Training and RL with Erik Bernhardsson, Modal CEO

Erik Bernhardsson, co-founder and CEO of Modal, joins to discuss the economics and competitive dynamics of AI infrastructure. Modal has raised over $1.2 billion—including a $750 million Series D led by Accel at a $15.75 billion valuation—and surpassed $1 billion in ARR. The conversation covers who wins the inference market, GPU pricing and data-center buildout, custom silicon and CUDA, open-source versus frontier models, and the limits of post-training and reinforcement learning. Erik also reflects on raising capital without a pitch deck, founding in his mid-30s, and where value may accrue for enterprises and startups across the AI stack.