Panel

Title: LLM Token Economy: How is networking going to play in the age of agents?

Abstract:

New business models in LLM workloads are reshaping the interconnect landscape. While ongoing challenges such as low latency, high bandwidth, and reliability persist, the emergence of scale-up networking creates new opportunities for performance with orders of magnitude more bandwidth. On the other end of the spectrum, applications are scaling across multiple data centers, trying to harness a million endpoints. The ability of software to deliver performance across the system holistically has become more challenging than ever, pushing the need for co-design. This HotI panel assembles experts from across the hardware and software stack to foster a discussion of these complex, multi-dimensional problems. The panel will explore the trade-offs between closed, and open AI models. Simultaneously, the panel will feature bleeding edge application developers, who will share their experiences leveraging current hardware, articulate their most pressing challenges, and envision the game-changing features that could revolutionize interconnect performance for their applications.

Moderator:

Peter Olcott Principal at First Spark Ventures

Peter Olcott is a Principal at First Spark Ventures, where he focuses on early-stage investments in AI and networking technologies. With a background in both engineering and business, Peter brings a unique perspective to the intersection of hardware and software innovation.

Panelists:

Phil Brown AI Systems Engineer at Meta	Phil leads the design of AI Systems for Meta, integrating high performance accelerators, networking and facilities to create the industry-leading training & inference systems we use to deliver our AI services to our customers. Previously Phil worked at Graphcore (a UK-based startup building AI accelerators) and at Cray developing and delivering large scale high performance computing systems. Phil holds a PhD in computational chemistry from the University of Bristol.
Davor Capalija Senior Fellow, AI Software and Architecture at Tenstorrent Inc.	Davor Capalija is a Senior Fellow at Tenstorrent, where he leads the scale‑out software team and works on software/hardware co‑design. He previously co‑led Tenstorrent’s low‑level programming stack, TT‑Metalium, and has been a public voice on the company’s scale‑out architecture. Before Tenstorrent, he worked in Intel’s PSG on OpenCL‑based deep‑learning acceleration for FPGAs. Davor holds a Ph.D. in ECE from the University of Toronto.
Ethan Lockshin AE, Commercial at Groq	Ethan Lockshin is a driven sales representative in the AI infrastructure space, currently serving as a Commercial Sales Representative at Groq, a leader in high‑performance AI inference hardware and software. Prior to joining Groq, he was the Head of Sales at Kubiya.ai—the first AI agent for DevOps. Prior to joining Kubiya, he spent nearly four years at CircleCI, selling DevOps tools to commercial and enterprise clients.
Sid Sheth Founder and CEO at d-Matrix	Sid Sheth co-founded d-Matrix in 2019 with a vision to build a new class of compute platform to deploy AI inference efficiently at-scale. In his role as CEO, Sid is leading a global team in developing a first-of-a-kind Generative AI inference solution using in-memory compute chiplet-based architectures, that promises to change the trajectory of commercially viable generative AI. Sid has spent more than two decades as a business and technical leader transforming startups into industry leaders and steering publicly traded corporations toward groundbreaking innovations. Prior to d-Matrix, as Sr. Vice President & GM for the Networking Business Unit at Inphi Corporation, he incubated and grew the group into a $1B+ business by focusing on the cloud and enterprise data center segment. Prior to Inphi, Sid was at NetLogic Microsystems (now Broadcom) and Intel where he ran marketing and worked in R&D for cutting-edge networking chips and processors. Sid earned his Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University, where he serves on the Electrical and Computer Engineering Advisory Board. He is a regularly featured speaker at industry tradeshows and conferences, is a published author at ISSCC and holds several patents.