Tokens, Compute and the Open AI Stack | Vipul Ved Prakash, Co-Founder & CEO at Together AI

Guest: Vipul Ved Prakash, CEO & Co-founder, Together AI — together.ai
Host: Sumant Mandal, Founder & Managing Partner, March Capital

Vipul Ved Prakash has spent two decades building systems that run at internet scale. One was a spam filter that still screens about a fifth of the world's email. Another was a real-time social search engine that Apple bought in 2014. When he co-founded Together AI in 2022, just before ChatGPT launched, he bet that AI would need an open ecosystem as much as it needed frontier labs. That bet now looks like the consensus view.

In this episode, March Capital's Sumant Mandal sits down with Vipul to trace his path from Cloudmark and Topsy to Apple's Siri group, and then to Together. Together is a platform that makes open-source models easy, cheap, and safe to run in production.

Tune in as Vipul and Sumant get into what he calls this year's "quiet revolution" in open models, why infrastructure must keep pace as tokens become more valuable, and what he expects the future to look like as open models match frontier intelligence.

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Together AI is the AI Native Cloud for inference, compute and model shaping. AI natives and enterprise use Together AI's full stack AI platform for every step in their AI development journey.

The Montgomery Summit returns to Santa Monica on March 9-10, 2027.

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00:00 Introduction to Together.ai and Vipul Ved Prakash
02:58 The Journey of AI: From Spam Filters to Foundational Models
05:52 Building an Open Ecosystem for AI
08:48 The Economics of Open Source vs. Closed Models
12:11 Regulatory Challenges and Industry Pushback
14:58 The Future of LLMs and AI Models
18:01 Infrastructure Challenges in AI Development
20:56 Global Perspectives on AI Infrastructure
23:53 Governance and Regulation in AI
27:03 The Vision for Together.ai
30:12 Final Thoughts and Future Directions