The Smartest Team in AI You've Never Heard Of

Season 3 Episode 15: Inside Baseten. Baseten is a $13 billion company most people have never heard of, and it's quietly running behind a lot of the AI you already use. It builds inference - the part that makes AI models actually respond when you prompt them - for companies like Lovable, Notion and Harvey. But they're also making a big bet: that AI shouldn't end up owned by two or three closed labs. Their whole thing is that if open models can be made fast and cheap enough to run in production, open source can win, and that keeps AI in more hands than just a few. So we spent a day at their HQ to figure out why they're backing open. We sat down with co-founder & CEO Tuhin Srivastava, model-training leads Charlie O'Neill and Mudith Jayasekara, and the researchers behind their new lab, Base Labs. We got into the stuff most companies won't say on camera - why the best open models right now are coming out of China, who actually decides an AI's values, the AI agents hacking into other companies, and why a team betting on open still thinks we need closed source too. The answer to "open or closed?" ended up being messier, and more interesting, than either side usually admits. 0:00 The Open vs Closed AI War 2:18 A Billion AI Requests a Day 3:43 The Best Models Are Chinese 4:06 Tuhin: Don't Rent Intelligence 5:09 Sachin & Tuhin Talk Cricket 6:02 Tuhin: The Real Bottleneck 10:15 Why Launch Base Labs? 11:35 "You Have to Have an Opinion" 12:52 Centralised Control Is the Danger 13:07 Publish Everything, Even Fails 15:08 Hugging Face & the 6-Month Gap 16:10 Why We Still Need Closed -- Thanks to Lovable for supporting our mission to tell the stories of the people building the future. Build your own AI tools at https://link.lovable.dev/o1nzU4W ($5 off your first paid month). -- JOIN OUR COMMUNITY LinkedIn 🚀:   / the-sachin-and-adam-show   🐦 X: https://x.com/Sachin_and_Adam 📸 Instagram:   / sachinandadam   About us We are two best friends, trying to build a community around in-depth interviews and short documentaries with the best minds in technology and startups. Through bold storytelling and candid conversations, we explore how visionary thinkers are shaping a positive future. The best way to support is subscribing, truly it makes all the difference for us 💙