GoKawiilNew guide frames inference engineering as the next platform-team skillset
A field guide aimed at platform engineers outlines why organizations are shifting to running open-source AI models themselves rather than relying solely on hosted frontier models. It cites DeepSeek's R1, released in January 2025, matching OpenAI's o1 on math and coding benchmarks within about a month, and notes Hugging Face now hosts over two million open models. The guide also references Upbound's Project Champagne work running models on its Modelplane tool, where most engineering effort went into infrastructure like TLS, identity and observability rather than model serving itself.