Baseten's Tuhin Srivastava on the stack behind owned intelligence

At ICONIQ Frontier, Tuhin Srivastava, co-founder and CEO of Baseten, laid out how he sees the AI stack evolving.

Eighteen months ago, most companies relied on one AI provider with a second on standby. Now, Tuhin is seeing teams add open-weight models, move to dedicated deployments they can tune, and eventually build portfolios of specialized models for different tasks.

That shift makes model choice increasingly contextual. The newest model may be best for an agent, while an older, cheaper model can be enough for generating training data. Tuhin thinks the challenge is managing that complexity: serving models, routing requests, evaluating performance, and continuously improving them.

Tuhin expects both open and closed models to remain important. What open models add, in his view, is permanence and control as companies increasingly shape AI around their own data, workflows, and goals.