Slush Gradient Descending: Agentic Era of Infrastructure

'Gradient Descending' is a series of roundtables on AI: curated deep dives with technical builders. Past roundtables discussions covered RL Environments, Evals, Fine-Tuning, Agent Frameworks, Open Source Models, and Knowledge Graphs with companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Scale AI and many more. For this special edition community side event during Slush Week, we're teaming up with Aiven, Modal and Avrea to discuss the next generation of cloud infrastructure. Giving an AI agent a sandbox or a VM is one thing but building infrastructure that allows thousands of agents to run reliably, securely and economically in production is a very different challenge. As agents move from writing code to deploying applications and managing infrastructure themselves, the requirements of the cloud are changing. Fast, disposable compute is only the beginning. What happens when agents need persistent state, access to sensitive systems, the ability to recover from failures and the freedom to operate without constant human supervision? And perhaps more importantly, can today's cloud infrastructure support this shift, or do we need to rethink how it's built? Joining us for the discussion: Ville Lehto (linkedin.com ↗): VP Strategy, Aiven Hannu Valtonen (linkedin.com ↗): Co-founder & CEO, Avrea Eric Hansander (linkedin.com ↗): Modal (previously co-founder & CEO of Twirl) Three people who have spent years building cloud infrastructure, developer platforms and the systems behind modern software. Agenda: Arrivals: 17:30-18:00 Roundtable discussion: 18:00–19:00 Drinks and canapés: 19:00–19:30 See past roundtables here: akashbajwa.co ↗ earlybird.com ↗ I agree that photographs and/or video may be taken during the event and used by the hosts on social media and in future promotional materials.