The CEO Behind the Fastest-Growing AI Inference Company | Tuhin Srivastava

The CEO Behind the Fastest-Growing AI Inference Company | Tuhin Srivastava

Author: Lukas Biewald November 18, 2025 Duration: 59:13

In this episode of Gradient Dissent, Lukas Biewald talks with Tuhin Srivastava, CEO and founder of Baseten, one of the fastest-growing companies in the AI inference ecosystem. Tuhin shares the real story behind Baseten’s rise and how the market finally aligned with the infrastructure they’d spent years building.

They get into the core challenges of modern inference, including why dedicated deployments matter, how runtime and infrastructure bottlenecks stack up, and what makes serving large models fundamentally different from smaller ones.

Tuhin also explains how vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, and SGLang differ in practice, what it takes to tune workloads for new chips like the B200, and why reliability becomes harder as systems scale. 

The conversation dives into company-building, from killing product lines to avoiding premature scaling while navigating a market that shifts every few weeks.

Connect with us here: 

Tuhin Srivastva: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tuhin-srivastava/ 

Lukas Biewald: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lbiewald/

Weights & Biases: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wandb/


Lukas Biewald hosts Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI, a series that moves beyond theoretical discussions to examine how artificial intelligence is actually built and deployed. Each episode features a direct, unscripted talk with a leading practitioner-you’ll hear from engineers and researchers at places like NVIDIA, Meta, Google, Lyft, and OpenAI. The focus is on the tangible challenges and breakthroughs they encounter, from initial research to the complex reality of putting models into production. This isn't about abstract futures; it's a grounded look at the decisions shaping the field right now. Biewald, bringing his perspective from Weights & Biases, steers conversations toward the practical trade-offs and collaborative efforts that define modern AI work. For anyone in technology or business who wants to understand the mechanics behind the headlines, this podcast offers a rare, candid window into the process. You’ll come away with a clearer sense of how ideas become functional systems and what it really takes to operate at the cutting edge.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI
Podcast Episodes
Matthew Davis — Bringing Genetic Insights to Everyone [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 43:02
Matthew explains how combining machine learning and computational biology can provide mainstream medicine with better diagnostics and insights. --- Matthew Davis is Head of AI at Invitae, the largest and fastest growing…
Clément Delangue — The Power of the Open Source Community [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 46:35
Clem explains the virtuous cycles behind the creation and success of Hugging Face, and shares his thoughts on where NLP is heading. --- Clément Delangue is co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face, the AI community building th…
Wojciech Zaremba — What Could Make AI Conscious? [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 44:27
Wojciech joins us to talk the principles behind OpenAI, the Fermi Paradox, and the future stages of developments in AGI. --- Wojciech Zaremba is a co-founder of OpenAI, a research company dedicated to discovering and ena…
Phil Brown — How IPUs are Advancing Machine Intelligence [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 57:10
Phil shares some of the approaches, like sparsity and low precision, behind the breakthrough performance of Graphcore's Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs). --- Phil Brown leads the Applications team at Graphcore, where…
Alyssa Simpson Rochwerger — Responsible ML in the Real World [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 45:29
From working on COVID-19 vaccine rollout to writing a book on responsible ML, Alyssa shares her thoughts on meaningful projects and the importance of teamwork. --- Alyssa Simpson Rochwerger is as a Director of Product at…
Sean Taylor — Business Decision Problems [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 45:41
Sean joins us to chat about ML models and tools at Lyft Rideshare Labs, Python vs R, time series forecasting with Prophet, and election forecasting. --- Sean Taylor is a Data Scientist at (and former Head of) Lyft Ridesh…
Polly Fordyce — Microfluidic Platforms and Machine Learning [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 45:55
Polly explains how microfluidics allow bioengineering researchers to create high throughput data, and shares her experiences with biology and machine learning. --- Polly Fordyce is an Assistant Professor of Genetics and…
Adrien Gaidon — Advancing ML Research in Autonomous Vehicles [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 48:02
Adrien Gaidon shares his approach to building teams and taking state-of-the-art research from conception to production at Toyota Research Institute. --- Adrien Gaidon is the Head of Machine Learning Research at the Toyot…
Nimrod Shabtay — Deployment and Monitoring at Nanit [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 33:59
A look at how Nimrod and the team at Nanit are building smart baby monitor systems, from data collection to model deployment and production monitoring. --- Nimrod Shabtay is a Senior Computer Vision Algorithm Developer a…

«1...678910