Crusoe Acquires Atero as Inference Becomes the Economic Center of AI

“Training was all the rage for the last few years,” Atero founder Alon Yariv told TBPN in a recent interview. “People all of a sudden realize that they need to make money off of AI and inference is the only place that you actually make any money building a model.” Inference, the process of serving a trained model so it can respond to user requests, is where the economics of AI are decided. It powers chatbot reply, every image generation, every automated email suggestion. The cost of delivering those outputs at scale is what determines whether AI companies can make money. Yariv’s team built Atero around that problem, focusing on memory as the bottleneck. “Models are huge. They’re about 1000 times larger than standard containerized applications. Just how much time it takes t