The TWIML AI Podcast (formerly This Week in Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence)

Scaling Agentic Inference Across Heterogeneous Compute with Zain Asgar - #757

The TWIML AI Podcast (formerly This Week in Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence)

Show Notes

In this episode, Zain Asgar, co-founder and CEO of Gimlet Labs, joins us to discuss the heterogeneous AI inference across diverse hardware. Zain argues that the current industry standard of running all AI workloads on high-end GPUs is unsustainable for agents, which consume significantly more tokens than traditional LLM applications. We explore Gimlet’s approach to heterogeneous inference, which involves disaggregating workloads across a mix of hardware—from H100s to older GPUs and CPUs—to optimize unit economics without sacrificing performance. We dive into their "three-layer cake" architecture: workload disaggregation, a compilation layer that maps models to specific hardware targets, and a novel system that uses LLMs to autonomously rewrite and optimize compute kernels. Finally, we discuss the complexities of networking in heterogeneous environments, the trade-offs between numerical precision and application accuracy, and the future of hardware-aware scheduling.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/757.

More from The TWIML AI Podcast (formerly This Week in Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence)

Oct 21, 2026

AI agents need the institutional knowledge experienced employees rely on: why a system works a certain way, which policies apply, and what never made it into the documentation. Capturing that knowledge is hard. Keeping it useful as people and agents add more may be harder.

Oct 15, 2026

In this episode, Zoe Weil, co-founder and CEO of Sequen, joins us to discuss how ranking systems can use live behavioral signals to optimize for purchases rather than clicks or search relevance alone. Zoe explains why approaches developed at data-rich social platforms don’t necessarily translate to retailers and how Sequen uses scroll speed, hover duration, and other in-session interactions to infer shopper intent without relying on user identity.

Oct 6, 2026

In this episode, Diogo Almeida, co-founder and CEO of TypeSafe, joins us to discuss Jev, TypeSafe’s recently released model for bringing fast, reliable intelligence directly into software. We explore the idea of “machine-native intelligence” and why Diogo believes models optimized for generating text are poorly suited to many of the decisions required for real-world automation. He explains how Jev differs from traditional classifiers and LLM-based approaches, the role of reinforcement learning from calibrated decisions (RLCD), and why calibration and reliability are central to making AI useful as a software primitive. We also discuss the relationship between models and code, why Diogo believes AI systems should become more engineered rather than relying on a single model to do everything, and how Jev-like models could reshape agents, tool use, and the architecture of AI-powered software.

Sep 29, 2026

AI systems have gone from struggling with grade-school math to helping solve research problems that have resisted mathematicians for decades, including Navier-Stokes.

Sep 17, 2026

Voice AI has gotten remarkably good, but natural conversation remains a high bar. Small delays, awkward interruptions, or the wrong tone can quickly break the illusion—and adding vision and visual presence only raises the stakes.

See all episodes →