What RunPod does
Runpod is an on-demand GPU compute platform positioned as an “AI Developer Cloud.” It provides a self-serve control plane for running AI workloads across three main compute modes: Serverless GPU endpoints for API-driven inference workloads that scale down to zero, Pods for persistent GPU instances used for development, experimentation, fine-tuning, and training, and Clusters for multi-GPU/distributed workloads. The company emphasizes developer onboarding speed (spin up a first workload quickly), transparent usage pricing (including per-second billing on Serverless), and the ability to progress from early prototyping to production inference on a single platform. Runpod also offers supporting developer infrastructure such as templates and a Hub/models directory to help users launch workloads faster.