Today we announced a $150M seed round in @inferact, a new startup led by the maintainers of the vLLM project. Inferact will support the vLLM open source project through dedicated financial and developer resources and build what they see as the next generation commercial inference engine. Cofounders Simon Mo and Woosuk Kwon joined a16z GP Matt Bornstein for a conversation on how vLLM came to be, what they’ve learned from building it, and what they’re now doing at Inferact. They cover how vLLM began as a side project, why open source is essential to the world’s AI infrastructure, why inference is getting harder, and more. 00:00 Introduction 11:41 Community and collaboration in vLLM 19:19 Understanding inference engines 24:27 Cluster scale and GPU deployment 31:19 Belief in open source AI 35:45 Founding Inferact 40:00 The future of Inference at scale @simon_mo_ @woosuk_k @BornsteinMatt(a16z)