Daniel Shaar

Thinking or tinkering @modal_labs — ex Jane St, Google, MIT

[Daniel Shaar @dshaar_]

@waltergoat it’s in your name

[Daniel Shaar @dshaar_]

When I grind, I want to do it with the best people, and preferably next to a beach some of the time :)

Go read this blog! Colin is a phenomenal writer and shared great systems intuition. My whiteboard diagramming skills could use some work.

[Modal @modal]

https://t.co/tkQwK6erWw

[Daniel Shaar @dshaar_]

We call this project “sandbox infinity” internally (coined by @waltergoat) and I’m super excited that we’ve begun releasing this in beta!

Hard to say whether the lore or the infra principles are more interesting. Lmk which you’d rather hear about 👀.

[Chris Prinz @ChrisPrinz]

will never forget when i intentionally naively asked @dshaar_ why 1M concurrent sandboxes is hard and he was like: "you're asking why is instantiating more than 10,000 containers per second hard?"

and then generously proceeded to explain all of the challenges and infra work that made this possible

huge props to the team

[Daniel Shaar @dshaar_]

This launch is huge...

And of course it's powered by new and improved SoTA infra you can only get from us ;)

[Modal @modal]

It is not too late to _actually_ own your inference.

Introducing: Modal Auto Endpoints.

[Daniel Shaar @dshaar_]

https://t.co/SlnI7jwBZj

[Daniel Shaar @dshaar_]

C is for "come join us", we're just getting started!

[Erik Bernhardsson @bernhardsson]

Today we're announcing our Series C funding: $355M at a $4.65B valuation, led by some great investors @generalcatalyst and @Redpoint.

We've had insane growth in the last year, but we're still very early. So proud of the team and what we have built so far!

[Daniel Shaar @dshaar_]

Gotta do something while my agents are busy…

[Peyton Walters @peywalt]

@modal 💚 @turbopuffer

👷‍♂️ by @dshaar_

[Modal @modal]

Unstick your AI

Modal x @krazamtv

[Modal @modal]

He finally found his match 💚 @waltergoat

[Daniel Shaar @dshaar_]

@jonobelotti_IO Great read!

[Daniel Shaar @dshaar_]

@itsandrewgao @cognition @DevinAI Save some for me! @stevenkplus1

[Daniel Shaar @dshaar_]

🎉 aaaand we also dropped a sick website redesign, check it out!

[Erik Bernhardsson @bernhardsson]

It's true – @modal has raised a $87M Series B at a $1.1B valuation to advance the future of AI infrastructure. 

Thank you to @Lux_Capital, @Redpoint, @AmplifyPartners, and others.

Now more than ever, AI demands a complete reinvention of traditional compute infrastructure

[Eric Zhang @ekzhang1]

We're thrilled to share Modal Notebooks: a new, powerful cloud-hosted GPU notebook. It has modern real-time collaborative editing and is backed by our AI infrastructure — swap GPUs in seconds.

Modal Notebooks are generally available, and you can start using them now. 🧵

[Daniel Shaar @dshaar_]

The internet (AWS, GCP, Cloudflare) is cooked - we’re cooking

[Modal @modal]

💚

[Daniel Shaar @dshaar_]

Building out the backend for “AI-scale” batch jobs on Modal has been one of the cooler bits of tech I’ve worked on. Making it ridiculously easy to use is what keeps Modal feeling like magic 🪄.

Super happy to see @_gongy and the team’s efforts here come to fruition!

[Modal @modal]

Today, we're launching Modal Batch. Run large-scale batch jobs that scale across thousands of containers without writing a single line of YAML.

[Daniel Shaar @dshaar_]

@zaachsiieegeel @charles_irl @akshat_b @modal_labs @andersonbcdefg Also, if you wanted to have info out while you’re holding a lock (like with the put version), you’d need a separate key for that. I imagine there are some annoying race conditions there

[Daniel Shaar @dshaar_]

@zaachsiieegeel @charles_irl @akshat_b @modal_labs @andersonbcdefg Interesting point—in principle the absence of a key could totally indicate that a lock is held! I think maybe there’s a sticking point around figuring out how the item first gets there to indicate an unlocked state

[Daniel Shaar @dshaar_]

Really excited to drop this! Check out the blog here - https://t.co/WfL66DGobS

Some alternative titles that didn’t quite make the cut:
- Big Dict Energy
- Dict Size Doesn’t Matter

[Akshat Bubna @akshat_b]

We've had support for Dicts, a serverless KV store, for a while now on @modal_labs. @dshaar_ just overhauled them to make them 10x better:

🚀 No scale limits
📆 LRU-cache semantics
🔐 Distributed locking
💎 Durability

With this, they feels much more like a primitive that *just work* for everything from storing temporary state to caching function results.