Kubernetes is rapidly emerging as the de facto operating system for AI, with two-thirds of organizations using it for generative AI inference and 82% adopting it in production. Its ecosystem — including tools like Kubeflow — enables organizations to build, scale, and retain control of AI systems through open, community-driven infrastructure. Bob Killen of CNCF and Liam Bollmann-Dodd of SlashData shared insights from recent reports showing that AI success still hinges on strong engineering fundamentals—especially internal developer platforms and overall developer experience.
While AI-generated code accelerates development, it shifts bottlenecks to DevOps, reliability, and security, increasing operational complexity. As a result, operator experience and well-defined guardrails have become critical to safely scaling AI. These controls help constrain both human and AI developers, reducing risk while enabling speed. At the same time, organizations are evolving team structures, expanding platform engineering groups to support internal users more effectively. Despite growing complexity, the core lesson remains consistent: open source innovation thrives on people, processes, and collaboration as much as on technology itself.
Learn more from The New Stack around the latest in Kubernetes and its emergence as an operating system for AI:
Kubernetes and AI: Are They a Fit?
How AI Is Pushing Kubernetes Storage Beyond Its Limits
Kubernetes and AI Are Shaping the Next Generation of Platforms
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Karthik Duraisamy is a professor at the University of Michigan.
He is co-leading U of M's newly created Institute of Agentic Computing, the first of its kind. The institute will serve researchers and developers building agentic AI infrastructure to advance scientific discovery, engineering, and the knowledge economy. It will also be a central node for managing developers and maintainers of the OpenClaw platform.
Karthik's research spans a broad spectrum of computational science and engineering, including new modeling approaches for complex physical systems, numerical methods, algorithms and uncertainty quantification.
This is the first conversation Karthik’s had going deep on the institute. We talk about using AI to advance scientific research, two new discoveries announced yesterday, how universities work, how AI is impacting students and education, and his advice for young people.
Thank you to Numeral, Flex, and Amplitude for supporting this episode
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Timestamps:
(0:25) The Institute for Agentic Computing
(4:27) OpenClaw Foundation and Lobster Compute Company
(8:19) How Universities actually work
(12:33) ClawCon in Ann Arbor
(15:24) Two scientific discoveries made with ScienceClaw
(20:06) How AI is speeding up scientific discovery
(25:42) Supporting AI and OpenClaw development
(29:55) Why universities function like VC funds
(34:29) How Universities get money from the government
(40:55) Why some academics believe AI is a fad
(46:17) Biggest bottlenecks in AI today
(49:26) How AI will change the world
(53:10) Karthik's Code Red advice for students
(59:19) Separating learning and doing
(1:03:10) Ways COVID and AI impacted college students
(1:14:53) How the role of universities is changing
(1:23:21) Why college classes suffered from grade inflation
(1:26:05) How AI is actually impacting the job market
(1:32:49) Karthik’s advice for students
(1:39:16) Winning two NCAA basketball national championships
(1:43:04) Almost dying in the Grand Teton National Park
Referenced
More on Karthik: https://aero.engin.umich.edu/people/duraisamy-karthik/
Institute for Agentic Computing: https://record.umich.edu/articles/u-m-launches-institute-for-agentic-computing/
ClawCon Announcement:
OpenClaw: https://openclaw.ai/
ScienceClaw: http://scienceclaw.science/
MIT OpenCourseWare: https://ocw.mit.edu/
ASU iPhone video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqfk7-3iN-U
Follow Karthik
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karthik-duraisamy-66705025
Follow Turner
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak
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Are bitcoiners underestimating the quantum threat to Bitcoin? That's the question Castle Island Ventures Partner Nic Carter has posed with some recent posts gauging the views of several leading Bitcoin developers on quantum computing.
To help answer the question, Unchained reached out to Ethereum Foundation Researcher Justin Drake and Michigan University Professor Chris Peikert. In this episode, Justin and Chris, who is one of the foremost experts on lattice cryptography, break down the quantum computing threat to crypto and the potential timelines.
Justin theorizes that Bitcoin developers may not be incentivized to talk about the quantum computing risk while still saying that a number of smart people are already taking it seriously and that may be enough.
Conversely, Chris highlights the constraints that come with uncertainty around risks and timelines.
Listen to find out what they conclude. Plus, could AI do crypto in before quantum computers?
Guests:
Justin Drake, Researcher at the Ethereum Foundation
Chris Peikert, Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, University of Michigan
Links:
Ethereum and Optimism Lay the Groundwork for a Post-Quantum Future
Q-Day Is Imminent. Can Bitcoin Survive the Quantum Threat?
Solana Deploys Post-Quantum Signatures on Testnet
Cracking Bitcoin Encryption Is Getting Much Easier, Google Says
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Will artificial intelligence be a job creator or a job destroyer? Who will be most affected — and how long will the AI revolution in employment take?
Futurist Martin Ford and economist Betsey Stevenson join Kara to unpack the realities behind the AI hype. They explore the impact of artificial intelligence on the future of work, from the fate of blue-collar jobs amid advancing robotics to the government’s role in helping workers navigate this new era. They also dive into ideas like universal basic income and a digital dividend, and examine how AI could redefine our economy, society, and the role work plays in a meaningful life.
Martin Ford is the founder of a software development firm and the author of four books, including the New York Times bestselling Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future.
Betsey Stevenson was the chief economist of the US Department of Labor from 2010 to 2011, and then served on the Council of Economic Advisors from 2013 to 2015. She's a professor of Public Policy and Economics at the University of Michigan and serves on the executive committee of the American Economic Association.
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Questions? Comments? Email us at on@voxmedia.com or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher.
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Dan Feder is a Senior Managing Director of Investments at the University of Michigan’s $18 billion endowment.
Our two hour conversation talks through the past, present, and future of all things venture capital, and investing more broadly.
Dan lays out the case for why most institutional investors should change how they approach asset allocation, why risk and uncertainty are not the same, the importance of relevance and independent thinking, advice for fund managers raising from institutional LP’s, the trend of VC’s rolling up services businesses, and what he learned from beating Lance Armstrong in a race.
Thanks to Chris Douvos @ Ahoy Capital and Adam Kurkiewicz at WashU for their brainstorming topics for Dan!
Special thanks to Ramp for supporting this episode. It's the corporate card and expense management platform used by over 40,000 companies, like Shopify, CBRE and Stripe. Time is money. Save both with Ramp. Get $250 for signing-up here: https://ramp.com/ThePeel
Try Hanover Park - the modern, AI-native fund admin https://www.hanoverpark.com/Turner
Timestamps:
(5:50) Beating Lance Armstrong in a race
(8:05) “The will to win is nothing without the will to prepare”
(10:39) Why investors need to re-think asset allocation
(22:31) Difference between risk and uncertainty
(29:26) How endowments work
(33:12) Endowment portfolio construction
(40:47) From law, to industrial buyouts, to venture
(49:13) Narrowing scope to increase returns
(54:54) Why career planning as an LP is hard
(58:24) VC in the 00’s
(1:08:18) Venture vs Adventure Capital
(1:15:16) VC’s rolling up legacy industries
(1:20:17) Importance of relevance
(1:26:25) Traits of the top investors
(1:28:25) Importance of trust in institutional LP fundraising
(1:32:54) Venture is the most competitive ass class
(1:35:37) Why venture firms do not persist over time
(1:38:27) How venture will change going forward
(1:43:37) The Newman Cycle
Referenced
A Sense of Where You Are by John McPhee: https://www.amazon.com/Sense-Where-You-Are-Princeton/dp/0374526893
Risk Uncertainty and Profit by Frank Knight: https://www.amazon.com/Risk-Uncertainty-Profit-Frank-Knight/dp/1614276390
Follow Dan
Twitter: https://x.com/federdan
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danfeder
Follow Turner
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak
Subscribe to my newsletter to get every episode + the transcript in your inbox every week: https://www.thespl.it/
Jason Corso speaks to Jon Krohn in this Five-Minute Friday all about Voxel51’s latest tool, Verified Auto-Labelling, and the company’s incredible success in developing popular tools for computer vision.
Additional materials: www.superdatascience.com/906
Interested in sponsoring a SuperDataScience Podcast episode? Email natalie@superdatascience.com for sponsorship information.
Today, we're joined by Jason Corso, co-founder of Voxel51 and professor at the University of Michigan, to explore automated labeling in computer vision. Jason introduces FiftyOne, an open-source platform for visualizing datasets, analyzing models, and improving data quality. We focus on Voxel51’s recent research report, “Zero-shot auto-labeling rivals human performance,” which demonstrates how zero-shot auto-labeling with foundation models can yield to significant cost and time savings compared to traditional human annotation. Jason explains how auto-labels, despite being "noisier" at lower confidence thresholds, can lead to better downstream model performance. We also cover Voxel51's "verified auto-labeling" approach, which utilizes a "stoplight" QA workflow (green, yellow, red light) to minimize human review. Finally, we discuss the challenges of handling decision boundary uncertainty and out-of-domain classes, the differences between synthetic data generation in vision and language domains, and the potential of agentic labeling.
The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/735.
Ethan Kross joins me today to talk about the importance of our inner voices. In his new book, Chatter, Ethan outlines how our inner voices affect us and how we can shape them as a helpful tool.
Chatter on Amazon
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📮 Ask a Question
If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.
📮 Join the Discord
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🧡 Leave a Review
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Ethan Kross joins me today to talk about the importance of our inner voices. In his new book, Chatter, Ethan outlines how our inner voices affect us and how we can shape them as a helpful tool.
Chatter on Amazon
✨ Sponsor: Remote Works (Podcast)
The way we work has changed forever. In each episode of Remote Works, Host Melanie Green, tells an insightful story about how people and companies are adapting.
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📮 Ask a Question
If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.
📮 Join the Discord
If you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community by visiting https://developertea.com/discord today!
🧡 Leave a Review
If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you.
Bob Killen is co-chair of Kubernetes' SIG Contributor Experience and was last week elected to the project's Steering Committee. He worked in academia for 15 years, latterly working on research projects using Kubernetes, with a focus on computer security. He's now made the leap to working on Cloud Native full time at Google. Bob joins us to explain why Kubernetes twitter is occasionally full of cartoon geese.
Do you have something cool to share? Some questions? Let us know:
web: kubernetespodcast.com
mail: kubernetespodcast@google.com
twitter: @kubernetespod
Chatter of the week Relive New Zealand's General Election coverage - 57% of the electorate voted early! tl:dr; Jacinda won by a lot
One NZ electorate had a 421 vote lead on the night
Ballot box in Washington State
Click here to take the Audience Survey: thank you for helping us make a better show for you!
News of the week VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 1.2 is GA
Red Hat integrates Ansible and OpenShift
Changes to the KubeCon EU Episode 107, with Priyanka Sharma
Cloud Native in China survey results
Introducing HA MicroK8s Episode 60, with Mark Shuttleworth
Helm turns 5 Episode 102, with Mark Butcher
Google Cloud Code adds support for 400+ CRDs
A holiday gift from AKS
Links from the interview University of Michigan
Little Bobby Tables Another Bobby Tables!
2600 Beige boxes
Red boxes
Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and the Blue Box
Jeff Sica
ARC-TS: Advanced Research Computing — Technology Services Great Lakes, the UMich HPC cluster
Kubernetes the New Research Platform - Lindsey Tulloch, Brock University & Bob Killen, University of Michigan
kube-batch
Volcano
Orchestructure meet-up and Mario Loria
SIG Contributor Experience Episode 74, with Jorge Castro
Episode 100 with Paris Pittman
Kubernetes Steering Committee 2020 Election
Election results
Travel support program
HONK Untitled Goose Game
/honk
Ian Coldwater's goose-themed talk from KubeCon NA 2019
honk.ci Announcement
GitHub repo
Challenges
Walkthrough
KubeCon NA events: SIG Honk AMA: Ian Coldwater, Duffie Cooley, Brad Geesaman, Rory McCune
Having Cloud Native Fun with HonkCTL: Jeff Sica
SIG Beard: see episode 46, with Aaron Crickenberger
Bob Killen on Twitter
Today we’re joined by Wilka Carvalho, a PhD student at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In our conversation, we focus on his paper ‘ROMA: A Relational, Object-Model Learning Agent for Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning.’ In the paper, Wilka explores the challenge of object interaction tasks, focusing on every day, in-home functions. We discuss how he’s addressing the challenge of ‘object-interaction’ tasks, the biggest obstacles he’s run into along the way.
Today we’re joined by Bob Killen, Research Cloud Administrator at the University of Michigan. In our conversation, we explore how Bob and his group at UM are deploying Kubernetes, the user experience, and how those users are taking advantage of distributed computing. We also discuss if ML/AI focused Kubernetes users should fear that the larger non-ML/AI user base will negatively impact their feature needs, where gaps currently exist in trying to support these ML/AI users’ workloads, and more!
We partnered with Red Hat to promote Season 3 of Command Line Heroes — an original podcast from Red Hat, hosted by Saron Yitbarek of CodeNewbie, about the people who transform technology from the command line up. It’s an awesome show and we’re huge fans of Saron and the team behind the podcast, so we wanted to share it with you.
Learn more and subscribe at redhat.com/commandlineheroes.
Join the discussion
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Featuring:
Clive Thompson – Website, X
Charles Severance – Website, GitHub, X
Michael Clayton – Website, X
Klint Finley – Website, X
Saron Yitbarek – Website, GitHub, X
Show Notes:
Check the show notes and transcript for more details.
A mission to set the course of the world wide web in its early days. 10 days to get it done. The result? An indispensable language that changed everything.
JavaScript was the underdog that won against all odds. Clive Thompson recounts the browser wars and how much the fallout influenced the future of the internet. Charles Severance explains how JavaScript went from a last-minute moonshot to the default web development language. Michael Clayton confesses he, like many others, underestimated JavaScript. And Klint Finley describes a gloomy internet without it.
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!