Baseten’s CEO on why every company will want to own its AI

AI inference serves as the critical backbone for deploying models in production, bridging the gap between raw compute and functional applications. As enterprises prioritize "owned intelligence" to maintain data sovereignty and cost control, the demand for specialized software stacks that manage heterogeneous compute across various cloud providers has surged. Baseten addresses this by abstracting infrastructure complexity, enabling companies to run open-weight and custom models reliably at scale. The industry is shifting toward a "continual learning loop" where user feedback and model performance data are internalized to improve proprietary outcomes. Looking ahead, the rise of AI agents—which execute tasks within virtual environments—promises to drive exponential growth in token volume, necessitating massive expansions in data center capacity and more efficient, specialized software architectures to support the next generation of autonomous, production-grade AI systems.