The Next Token

"I'm the Arbiter of Tokens and GPUs" - Ep 05

Recorded August 24, 2026. Special guest Michelle Chen answers our questions about inference. The AI industry lights money on fire. Sunil plans his LLM prepper era. Rhys takes the week off, preparing for YC Demo Day! LINKS / ON-SCREEN REFERENCES, IN ORDER Executor (Rhys's company) https://executor.sh Y Combinator Demo Day https://www.ycombinator.com/demoday Michelle Chen on X https://x.com/michellechen Love Island S8 villa tour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2gjF5NFQng Cloudflare Workers AI https://www.cloudflare.com/products/workers-ai/ Cloudflare AI Gateway https://www.cloudflare.com/products/ai-gateway/ Cloudflare AI Search https://developers.cloudflare.com/ai-search/ Models on Workers AI https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers-ai/models/ Cloudflare/NVIDIA GPU blog post (2021) https://blog.cloudflare.com/bringing-ai-to-the-edge/ Dane Knecht, Cloudflare CTO on X https://x.com/dok2001 Birthday week https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/birthday-week/ Unifying Workers AI and AI Gateway https://blog.cloudflare.com/workers-ai-gateway-unification/ Z.ai / Zhipu (GLM) https://z.ai Hugging Face https://huggingface.co Cloudflare R2 https://www.cloudflare.com/products/r2/ SGLang https://x.com/sgl_project vLLM https://docs.vllm.ai OpenRouter model discounts https://openrouter.ai/models?discount=true DeepSeek https://www.deepseek.com Moonshot AI (Kimi) https://www.moonshot.ai Moondream https://moondream.ai OpenAI io (Jony Ive) https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/ SlopCodeBench (aka "SlopBench") https://github.com/humanlayer/advanced-context-engineering-for-coding-agents Opus 5 on SlopCodeBench https://github.com/humanlayer/advanced-context-engineering-for-coding-agents/blob/main/benchmarking-opus-5-on-slop-code-bench.md The Next Token Ep 03 (AI psychosis) https://youtu.be/2bE93tynluk Ox Alpha/GLM-5.3 Flash https://x.com/Zai_org/status/2092616204787626030 The subreddit for Sunil https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/ Solarpunk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solarpunk AMD Instinct https://www.amd.com/en/products/accelerators/instinct.html Jensen Huang was once a Denny's waiter https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-billionaire-ceo-went-denny-145530671.html CUDA https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-toolkit Wafer (GPUSteve's company) https://www.wafer.ai/ NVIDIA Blackwell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwell_(microarchitecture) NVIDIA Hopper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopper_(microarchitecture) Black Forest Labs Flux.1-dev https://huggingface.co/black-forest-labs/FLUX.1-dev NVIDIA Vera Rubin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubin_(microarchitecture) ZIRP era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policy Q-commerce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-commerce Cloudflare Durable Objects https://developers.cloudflare.com/durable-objects/ Kenton Varda continues to be right 6 months ago https://x.com/kentonvarda Sparkles emoji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparkles_emoji Community, the Greendale flag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEjIzKZ4wOA Sunil's new role https://x.com/threepointone/status/2088272607804039274 Sunil's builder-in-residence role https://sunilpai.dev/posts/the-task-isnt-the-job/ Sunil on software factories https://x.com/threepointone/status/2091167009669075314 Max Kreminski https://mkremins.github.io/ SUBSCRIBE Subscribe on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@NextTokenShow and wherever you get your podcasts GUEST Michelle Chen - https://x.com/michellechen - https://blog.cloudflare.com/author/michelle/ HOSTS Dillon Mulroy - https://x.com/dillon_mulroy - https://dillonis.online/ - https://twitch.tv/dillon Rhys Sullivan - https://x.com/RhysSullivan - https://rhys.dev/ - https://executor.sh/ Sunil Pai - https://x.com/threepointone - https://sunilpai.dev/ The Next Token - https://x.com/NextTokenShow - https://www.youtube.com/@NextTokenShow Sponsored by Cloudflare - https://www.cloudflare.com/