The Frontier AI Inference Cloud for Agents — Byung-Gon (Gon) Chun, FriendliAI
Byung-Gon Chun from FriendliAI shows how AI agents — programs that plan, act, and observe in loops — change the economics of running AI models.
When the same coding task (building a game) ran on a closed frontier model and an open model, the open version cost roughly one-sixth as much. The challenge is that agents differ from regular chat: instead of single requests, they involve long tasks where the same computations repeat. FriendliAI rebuilt its infrastructure with four techniques — caching reused calculations, smartly routing requests to the right server, and scheduling that understands agent structure. A customer test showed seven times faster performance with fewer errors.
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