What is [[Modal]] (to an audience of my people at Harvard/MIT):
(Preface: I really like computers! Just saying.)
Modal does two things: rent out flexible increments of compute, and build the systems for people to interact with remote computers.
Why? Computers are all around us; you checked the weather this morning, but a wind turbine operator might check the state of the electrical grid, restaurants manage inventory, even the ISS navigates in orbit with computers.
Computers are how we process huge amounts of data (in energy, elections, housing, biology…), which would never be possible by hand, and in that sense computation augments how we understand the world.
If you want to run something on 1 CPU, you just define a function and run it. Right now doing that on 1000 CPUs is expensive and difficult though. Modal makes it easy and cost-effective — just define a function and run it, same as always!
In that way we reduce the barrier to computing. We have labs using Modal to process terabytes of protein data, climate scientists analyzing satellite imagery in real time, Substack generating audio transcripts for its articles for people hard-of-hearing, d2c businesses using it to power precise product recommendations for their customers … those are the users we serve, who are able to do more with our platform.
My work involves a lot of systems: utilizing computing hardware to solve computational problems; but it’s also interaction design, developing ideas and tools that conform to human skills and tendencies, so they can better use Modal.