The a16z Show · Thursday, August 6, 2026
Simon Mo describes the co-design process for releasing AI models as complex, involving model labs, hardware vendors, Infrac (VLLM), and Hugging Face. He notes that even with a model released, ensuring its effective use requires a partnership drive to support it properly.
“Oh, it's actually a very fun co-design process because from model lab's point of view, right, these are brilliant researchers who have built this model. Now their biggest question becomes, how do we get this out of the world and make sure everybody is able to use it and run it well?”
“And we have worked with model labs that are, um, very just because they just use VLM already in production or in research processes, they will just do anything for you.”
“And additionally VLM also works closely with all the hardware vendors. So that means across like Nvidia, AMD, Google and Amazon, and a lot more, their newest chip will make sure VLM can run on them. And then in many cases they use VLM as a benchmark to make sure it runs well on them. So this kind of fusion of where models run and where it gets to meet the hardware is where the magic happens. And this is where VLM is.”