---
title: "Slides: What Lies Beneath the API — Benjamin Cowen, Modal"
category: "slides"
video_id: "HvZXAOZ3iv8"
sourceLabels: ["Public YouTube video frames", "Public YouTube metadata"]
---

# Slides: What Lies Beneath the API — Benjamin Cowen, Modal

## Source Video
[What Lies Beneath the API — Benjamin Cowen, Modal](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvZXAOZ3iv8)

## Relationship To World's Fair 2026
These slides are extracted from a public AI Engineer YouTube video connected to World's Fair 2026. Speaker-matched clips are supporting context unless later confirmed as exact session recordings; official livestream recordings are day-level/event-level source material.

## Related Scheduled Sessions
- No individual scheduled session mapping has been assigned yet; treat this as an event livestream deck.

## Extracted Slides
![[assets/slides/HvZXAOZ3iv8/slide-001.jpg]]

OCR text:

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![[assets/slides/HvZXAOZ3iv8/slide-002.jpg]]

OCR text:

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> What Lies Beneath the API:
> When you should fine-tune your own model
> Benjamin Cowen, PhD
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![[assets/slides/HvZXAOZ3iv8/slide-003.jpg]]

OCR text:

> Modal 101 Functions Sandboxes
> Pon a Storage Application State Led rere clare
> . * As a general purpose platform, we're seeing
> ra é some interesting patterns.
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> Capacity Orchestration
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![[assets/slides/HvZXAOZ3iv8/slide-004.jpg]]

OCR text:

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![[assets/slides/HvZXAOZ3iv8/slide-005.jpg]]

OCR text:

> Works for
> © Get started fast
> « —Noinfrastructure overhead
> . ® Very good models!
> oe Use a frontier API
> * *
> * va Move fast Snip semetn. aq When you might want to shift
> Sd n i bd e You need performance control at scale
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> © You need model differentiation
> © You're hitting rate mits
> 7 ”
> a | Al Engineer |
> SU ela

![[assets/slides/HvZXAOZ3iv8/slide-006.jpg]]

OCR text:

> SFT in 300 lines
> st of code
> Ea bs
> * *
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> ior diel Once you have your data in place, open source
> libraries and serverless infra make parallel
> hyperparameter sweeps trivial.
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> at

![[assets/slides/HvZXAOZ3iv8/slide-007.jpg]]

OCR text:

> GRPO (RL) in 300
> a lines of code.
> Mare
> 7 ion ial ’ Unified GPU + Sandbox APIs makes large scale
> eee
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> , Engineering the future of Al


## Slide-Derived Subjects To Review
Subject extraction uses video title, related session titles/descriptions, transcript context, and OCR text when available. OCR is best-effort and should be reviewed against the embedded slide images.