YouSaid · the spoken record

Lin Qiao

lines on the record: 77
first: 2026-07-20
most recent: 2026-07-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I really see people will own their everything company will own their own intelligence as a must have is not optional. That's a trend I'm seeing because there's an analogy to software is there's a reason why every company build their own software stack. There's no standardized software you just use off the shelf to solve your problem because every single company is solving a unique problem and they want to build software because they want to have full control. I always say they will pick and choose which part of the stack they want to build themselves, which part of the stack is common knowledge is no point of building. But every single company own their own software stack. Obviously we're talking about in the SaaS time, right? So same. I think AI time every single company should own their own intelligence.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm confident in our capability of driving the business, and to me this is a year I want to prove we can scale quickly by keeping the same velocity. And that's very important to me. If we reach that point, we should prove point and next year I have a lot more confidence, continuous scale of extreme aggressively. I want to make sure we do it right this year.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we haven't spent too much time in traditional enterprise segment. I think that's just because we were very small. And now as we build out our company, I do think even without us investing, we have customers like Geico, like Capital One, all these companies. So even without us pursuing enterprise tradition enterprise, they come to us. But I do think that's a very big market.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has the sexy part of this is such an innovative creative technology and build something on top of it is the focus but monitoring the RI, I think the industry starts to kind of pay attention to it. But eventually that's what matters. Not how much spend is what is return and what is the cost and what is attribution. In the next couple of years as AI is getting more and more into production, there will be a lot of focus in getting that clarity and getting that discipline out. The token maxine is just a thing in time, but we're quickly moving to RI maxing, which is about all about running a business.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We talk about it. So we are a little bit nerdy. In this way, at the very beginning of our journey, we didn't discuss it, but we feel proud of us speak for self at the end, prada stands, and we want to devote all our effort and focus on building product, working with customer, validate product market fit, and go find there. And we didn't spend much time marketing at all. We didn't prioritize educating our customer what's the right direction to think about the trend and the value, but we do think now I do think it's important. Marketing is not about flaws. It's more about education. It's more about clarity, and we are working on that.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it's guaranteed, there is information loss in transition, layer after layer, people, it always happens. And not knowing what exactly is happening and having the precision of make judgment makes bad leadership. He is demonstrated through his own example even before this crazy AI thing is operating that way. And before I was admiring him, his sheer amount of volume of capability of doing that, now I understand wisdom behind that because I also operate that way. I need to know what's happening on the ground to make the judgment for the company.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He is everywhere I serious think he has a clone of like hundreds of Jensen somehow plugging for example I sent him an email you will reply in one minute I just don't understand how he's like constantly in details but now I operate the company for four years I understand why he's doing that is that defines velocity because what is leadership leadership is just judgment it's not privilege it's judgment you basically have the context you have the right contest to make the right judgment for the team and especially in a high velocity space if you do not know what's happening what works what doesn't work what are the gaps you make the wrong call in a slow moving space you can wait for the cascading information up and down and make those calls but in a fast iteration space you just cannot wait”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“in weird way is not competence. We want people with high competence, but more importantly, the strong indicator whether they will do well in this wave, especially in fireworks, is whether they are really built for taking stream ownership. Extreme ownership as in we are not putting people anywhere in any boxes and we're just stacking the box together into a tower. People just automatically claim, hey, this end-to-end problem, I'm going to see through the whole thing and work with a bunch of people to make it happen and I'm going to deliver it no matter what. So those kind of people has the highest longest mileage and their growth curve is amazing also.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think how fast we grow, I change my mind because I have been quite worried about too big a team too early. So that's why when I met Georgia, I told him we're too small for you because I don't intend to grow very fast in terms of people. I worry about getting slowed down and lose agility and velocity very deeply. But since then we have been very aggressively using our tools. We have developed our own unique way of hiring certain type of people that we know they will be charging forward with high velocity as extreme sense of ownership, very communicative, and never take no as answer. So we also learn how to get those people. And now I feel much more comfortable scanning really fast.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To also have increasing productivity to match. So that's a problem he's solving, and I feel very fortunate to work with him. In general, I feel in the AI space, the unique part is people need to have very special traits. Almost like contradictory characteristics, for example, very experienced but super curious in the fast learning curve, or Dima we talked a little bit earlier, he is brilliant, high intellectual horsepower, but extremely humble. It's weird combination, and he's almost like cynical in an Eastern European way, but also at the same time very humble.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He did a lot of things, a great accomplishment in the past. I find a unique character about him is extremely experienced, has high altitude of business vision, but he is also very curious. It doesn't make assumptions. I know it all. I've seen all the movies. It's the same movie. And let me just kind of direct this movie as I did in the past. So he didn't come with that attitude. He knows AI goes in insanely fast pace, learning a long way, but also fully embrace AI. Actually, his team, our GTM team is using all kinds of AI agents. They're sharing skills. So they maximize their productivity. And he knows we have a superlinear demand curve. There's just certain pace we can build our GTM team. In order for us to catch this curve, we need to build a team.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At 50 people, I'm more thinking about scaling the product first than scaling massively scale the business. And we talked, and I have huge respect to him, I know he's legendary. He's a legendary operator in Silicon Valley. I just feel like we're too small for him. And I told him that we're probably too small for you, but I would like to work with you at some capacity so he helped me actually build up the team, interview a lot of executives. His feedback is always well balanced, well thoughtful. And we start work together in that capacity until I think end of last year we're growing really fast, and he knows. And we start talking seriously, and that early relationship paid off. He's really cool in the sense that he's...”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's because there is a fundamental disruption in this technology that is all empowering, all empowering the sense it reach out to every individual one of us to be creative and it unleash a lot of creativity that we just don't have access to. And that's why we're seeing this phenomenon of extremely fast growth because of a demand.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I still think we don't have a great system for very large models. I really believe the fundamental low level infrastructure cause will go down. For solving tasks we should need less token, that will increase. So collectively, the cost will significantly reduce, therefore we can run the highest intelligence model much more ubiquitously in the future, but we don't have a system designing for that. For example, we don't have a great system designed for 10 trillion parameter models today. That will require very smart engineer co-design from the model to the customization serving platform layer all the way to chip layer. The chip is not the individual chip but the system. Collection of chips in system and all as a total package. I think there's still a lot of innovation we can do.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“ASIC company they started before JI. They started on some seasons to optimize some workload. And they appeared to AI and trying to kind of fitting AI workloads almost like you bet before this AI workload emerges and now it becomes a serendipity question. Are you lucky enough this just work, right? And some really worked. Some fundamental design of putting a lot of SRAM on the chip is great for AI model because they are memory hungry and this really accelerates the execution of inference and so on. So those works and something work.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I still see the whole AI world, especially models, customization is very dynamic. Workload patterns very dynamic. So think about how much energy in the application space people are experimenting, all kind of things. You don't know which one is going to take off. And they will just take off quickly. And once they take off, I wish one is going to sustain. And a few ones will sustain, then that's the time. Oh, now we know this is the pattern. And now we should probably encode this pattern into hardware and bring this hardware into a data center and so on. It's all cascading. And then it's going to cascade down to me, it's a fernal question. Where are we in the stage of fernal? Maturity ferno, I mean. We're still in the early stage of workload maturity fernal to warrant a chip that will be durable. So now you go back to, oh, we have so many accelerators that are successful. Some are really successful. But remember those.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Matt has been building their chips for more than five years, way more than five years. And MTIA has been project since eighteen, maybe earlier. Because MATA has been investing AI for a long time, pre-GNI, and they have a huge AI workload focused on ranking recommendation. MATA has been building other hardware as well in the past. So whenever the usage has passed a certain threshold, it make economic sense for you to build the underlying supply. And you can specialize towards your workload. And that's another form of specialization. It's specialize to bake your logic into hardware and this hardware is purpose-built for your particular workload. And you better make sure this workload doesn't change. Because it's really hard. Once you say the hardware is taped out, it's really hard to go back and change it. It's possible, it's very costly. So once your workload stabilized, once your business stabilized, it doesn't change too often.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I definitely see that possibility. I also see if we think about general intelligence model as the electricity layer, as a power line, every country should own their own power line, right? So I think that is a very scary moment. My power line is going to be cut off and all my fundamental day-to-day is going to not working because I feel so frustrated whenever there's power outage in my home alone. I feel so frustrated when I cannot access my Wi-Fi. I feel so anxious. So, I mean, obviously operating the country is extremely important built on top of this fundamental baseline. And for every single company, the same thing. It's not just whether a country should have their unique sovereign independence But every single company should have their independence. You don't want any single person to cut you off. That's extremely scary moment.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And for you to have the control, then you have to build on top of some open model. You have to kind of turn your data into intelligence. That's pretty much the path we've seen so many companies across industry, the reach the same conclusion that are moving towards distraction.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're in the adoption curve where a lot more companies they are in the air space start to seriously think about moving to specialized intelligence, to start to seriously think about owning their intelligence is better than renting. Because going back to this optimization, when is the good timing, right? So it's the same question we're answering for ourselves when built versus buy and our customers also think about build versus buy or build versus rent own versus rent, right? I think AI journey or AI adoption journey has gone further along into a lot of companies has meaningful traffic. A lot of the company is deploying AI into production. A lot of the company is at the face of scaling and that's where optimization kicks in. When optimization kicks in, you need to have control to optimize. If you have control, you just don't have the range to optimize.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We know its whole power is not a snapshot in time, it's gonna be a long term situation. We do see a particular industry will oscillate and start to settle with a few good ones. Take Lego, for example, I was on a dinner table and interesting seems like there were a lot of those companies around two years ago, but now it's pretty much. I think it's a long game.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always optimize, we want to optimize both. So here's how I think about it. Optimize for growth requires a lot of business planning, assuming there's product market fit. Optimize for growth margin is optimized for differentiation. I think I want to avoid overoptimizing for growth margin. But we should optimize for growth margin continuously, as in we should optimize for product differentiation continuously. There's no question about it. I think we want to continuous optimize towards a healthy growth margin which allow us to grow really fast. And it's a trade-off and we don't take compromises. The compromise as in we overoptimize growth margin to result in a very slow growth. And one possible way to optimize growth margin we do not grow at all. We just optimize a heck out of it. I know we can climb to a high number, but that's absolute disaster outcome.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The speed of multiva definitely is the fastest, but even the hardware innovation itself is the fastest. So after three years, if every year there's three hardware skills, after three years, there are nine hardware skills in between. Do you still want to go back to nine generation older hardware running three years old model on that? That's questionable. Maybe there's a world which is still valuable, but with this pace of innovation, it's questionable. Now with the different depreciation cycle, it changes the dynamics of build versus own. Build versus buy. And again, it goes back to my original thesis of do you optimize for growth or do you optimize for growth margin? It's all about timing.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We calculate growth margin is interesting these days because how long does hardware depreciate has significant changed? In the past, it's six years, solid six years, and hardware release is usually three years. That's fast. And now, within a year from one vendor alone, we have three SKUs. The newer model usually runs the best on the newest hardware. Model depreciation is also very fast. Every week we are launching a new model. And the model is kind of peak in its value before the next model comes out. And the new model likes the newest hardware. And imagine this cadence after two years, which model runs on the two years old hardware. It will be two year old model. Are those models still valuable? So I think that's kind of the real dynamics we're facing right now is the hardware will last for six years still.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think in general, infrastructure, physical infrastructure construction in China is going really fast. I literally see some kind of crossover bridge being built within a week. The velocity is very high there. And there's a highway close to my home after one year it's not done yet. So it's also a crossover. So I do think there's a unique strength probably because of the population density and they are specializing in those kind of construction. But I do think we also have those specialty people. It's just even I heard even electrician is under severe shortage. We are under global supply chain constraint here.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Data sense is so complicated, right? If you think about the beginning all the way from construction to power deployment, you have the right power to come in, right fiber channel, the right cooling, especially neurotips requires liquid cooling. To get all this right and the parts can fall apart and how to replace them, it is all very deep expertise. It's no joke. It's not tomorrow I can be a data center operator I cannot.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, fan of his. But it's a great combination between a flop's intense GPU and SRAM intense A6 because flop intense is really good for first half of LM processing. It's prefuel. It's called preflu, processing and prompt and so on. And SRAM intense is really good for generation. That's just the nature of the model architecture. It's great to combine these two instead of running heterogeneously on the same chip. But that requires a very unique system design and deployment into data center. And it is heterogeneous actually before I really mean homogeneous design as much better for operation. And this is heterogeneous. And then how to operate this heterogeneous design requires unique innovation in data center deployment and so on.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I build in centers at Mada. Also lots of innovation possible there. There's no one size fits all as well. And building on GPU native data centers is also interesting. So it's a trade-off, right? From operational point of view, it's much better to build a heterogeneous deployment. It's all the same chips, all the same skew as big as possible and run multiple workloads, so it's fungible. It's very easy to manage it. You build one principle, one process to do maintenance operation. Again, it goes to optimization, but once it's so big, then any optimization is going to drive a lot of economic recently acquired company also called Grok with Q. It's a large SRAM based ASIC accelerator I spoke to.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not into, we absolutely are not going to move into application layer. Very clear to us. Whether we will move down into build data centers and so on, that could be always beyond the table, but the question is timing.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Goal optimize the heck out of it. I think my name you would think about business the same way. When in the hyper growth, if our focus is only optimized growth margin, we absolutely can do that, but we are sacrificing the speed of growth because we want to go everywhere. We want to go into different georegions, we want to go into tackle different use cases, we want to create constantly create different product lines. And those are not the time for optimization, that's my opinion.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think that's new normal. That is a reflection. At least for us, I don't know other companies. For us, it is a reflection of we are in a hypergrowth phase. During hypergrowth phase, you have the choice, right? You either optimize, to me, margin optimization is a constraint problem, as in, hey, we want to go to 70% margin. We want to go to 80% margin. And then we are going to go backwards and impose those constraints to guarantee those margin. And usually constraints slow down innovation. So give you an example. During system development and in a high velocity system expanding phase, we don't want to overbuild because we are in kind of high experimentation, we are testing what will stay, will not stay. Optimization doesn't make any sense. Once we know this is system that we want to build 100% and we are going to scale this a thousand times bigger,”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a matter of fact, we do have an FDA team. It's called Applied Machine Learning Engineering Team, so their primary job is to accelerate this customized deployment as a matter of fact to also build the agent, to automate the logic deployment.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Additional value, and that's why we are not interested in commoditized one size fits all. This off-the-shelf model deployed in the same way for everyone, that kind of business will always customize model deploy in a unique way for your particular workload.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“KLD. KLD is a measure of quality. And what it means is between the training system and the inference system when model move over, we have bit equivalence. So as in the numerics are fully the same. We do not lose a bit of accuracy. That's really hard to achieve. But the reason we push that, we deliver that and the reason we push that is because we know primary basis is in model customization and inference of customized model. And we want our customers every single dollar investing training, maximize it. And then if cross training inference boundary is not bidwise equivalent, they just drop the quality down. And then it's like you pay your training investment by discounted quality. Why do you do that? So quality first and quality.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we're probably not comparing apples to apple in the sense that again goes back to our business, majority of our traffic is customized model. We optimize for quality, number one, always quality.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We also specialize in making the unit of economists much better through our platform. And third is underlying infrastructure like the GPUs, the surrounding memories, and all this. Today is under stark supply chain constraint is going to get much better. Situation will get much better. I don't think probably in the next one year or a year half, this situation will not change. But in the long term, two to three years, you should change. And that cost will compress. So overall, I can imagine 10x cost reduction in the next three years. And this 10x cost reduction will drive 100x usage.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's different ways to think about it. Not all tokens are equal. I think we should establish a best practice to evaluate the token economy per task. Because different models have different way of spit out tokens. Some are much more verbose than the other. So you can imagine one model is 2x cheaper than the other, but it's 2x multiples to solve the same task and they're the same cost. But overall, I think as the model quality improve, I think being precise is going to be part of the optimization. And so that's one level of optimization is to solve one task, we should need less tokens. And the second is for one token, and how to do that is you need to customize the model to solve your problem, especially better and more precise. That goes into model tuning. And second is, for each token spit out from those models and processed by those models,”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It hasn't so far because of supply chain constraint, but we are living in a free economy. So think about whenever there's shortage price is high, prices high, high price will invite a lot of people coming to solve the problem, and it will invite competition. Competition will bring down the cost, and then eventually will lead to a very economical solution. But actually, that's good for everyone, because much more affordable infrastructure will invite more usage. So my prediction is with the decrease of the infrastructure, that's where it comes to my prediction of how far next year will look like. Because the infrastructure cost will go down and usage will explode because of that, right? So the moment you don't think about that as a problem for you. And if it's a utility, you just use it.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's not building a cloud either, right? You can say, hey, Jensen, probably you have all the rights to build an media cloud. So he's not building a cloud infrastructure. I think he mentioned that as well. I mean, people ask him that question. And he also mentioned he wanted to specialize in what they have the rights to do. Why models? I think it's pure a supply chain question is if US doesn't have a US native open model, it's a problem. It's a supply chain problem. So he is solely there to solve the supply chain problem. But if there's no supply chain problem because the company like us are providing these specialized intelligence platform layer, then he doesn't need to worry about it. So he just want to make sure the whole entire five layers of AI cake is flowing. There's no blockage. And if there's a blockage, he's interested in solving those problems.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cursor is the first company they have decided to work with us early on. I still remember when they worked with us they were single digit million dollar. Very small. That's only two years ago. They grow by a hundred, a thousand X. Over two years. But they decide to work with us early on because they recognize they only want to focus on product innovation and later on research. They do not want to focus on, you know, these platform innovation. They know we are putting all our R&D in there and they want to find the best partner to win big. I do think that's the right mentality to specialize and we want to specialize. We do not want to kind of own the whole entire stack. That's not our goal as a company.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It really depends on the company philosophy. To us, agility is everything, and when to earn the rights of building anything, so focus is everything for us, and we want to focus on where we add the biggest amount of value based on our strength. We would like to leverage other people's strength to build on top of. So in particular, we want to run everywhere all possible air chips in the world. We don't want to limit it by how much chips we can bring into our data center whether we're constructed or rented. But over time, when the business grows very big, right? So I still remember when Madda was young, they don't build everything. And when they are big, they make sense to build. You earn a rise to build for your own giant traffic and if it saves like five times more cost, then you should go do it, right? But I think at the early stage, that's why tell you an interesting story in the coding space.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is right. At the same time, I think Jensen has a five-layered AI cake from top-down application model infrastructure chips energy. We are a bottlenecked by the lower part of the AI cake in terms of supply chain. Being energy, being chips in the physical world, how fast we can manufacture. Because in the history, all these industries are not designed for massive scaling. Speaking about 100x scaling, no one was designed for that. I talked with many manufacturers. It's kind of well bottlenecked by small parts transistor. The smallest tiny parts that hold off the whole manufacturer line of servers that can deploy to data center and being used to generate tokens.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think people are more in tuned to multi vendor strategy in this space because they don't know what's happening. It feels safe to have multiple providers to balance things out. But we don't view ourselves as an inference provider. Again, we view ourselves as delivering these specialized intelligence where we help companies tune their model, give you some numbers. Today we process more than 40 trillion tokens a day. majority of those tokens are coming from a customized model, not from off the shelf models, are coming from customized model.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So those are deep research, general purpose deep research, or there are so many different categories of special purpose coworkal. We just talked about two great legal companies, finance, customer support, recruiting, sales, marketing, healthcare. So there's very broad set of co-work space of innovation app company. They are doing really well, and we have them as our customer base. And then more interestingly, we start to see an uptick of consumer facing company, or all start to look into JNI technology. They are changing how they are thinking about their traditional business of doing recommendation, for example. And that's very interesting to me because we have obviously worked at a huge recommendation system in the world meta, and we are very eager to see how that transform into a new. Account on me for us”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, everyone is concerned. The whole entire industry in terms of application innovation is by model, in the sense there are few companies are ever successful. They escape velocity, but few of them. So that's the shape of the Hoint Tai industry. In last year, cursor is one of the few. I would say all model companies are concentrated on cursor. We concentrate on the same group of app companies. And since then, it does change. We do have a very healthy, diversified customer base, especially, I think last year is the year of coding. I think all major coding companies are on us. And this year is the year of cowork. And cowork is much more diversified by itself than coding, because there's general purpose cowork, for example, general purpose co-work to help you do all kind of research. You want to ask, hey, what will be the NVIDIA GPU prize two years later?”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Scatter GPUs and they are able to run massive jobs, R jobs. But the challenge there is we need to sync model weights across all these different regions and how hard can that be? It matters because the latency of delay of sending these weights over is going to dictate how fresh the rewards are. And then if it's too stale, then you are too off. So it's a balance. But we innovate a way we can distribute fresh model weights quickly. It's not too off. So numerically it's still sound while we are not limited by very expensive deployment of GPU fleet. So those are the innovations we work together with Cursor to push the boundary and leading to their recent model launches. We're very proud of them.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“into P2Ps one is the trainer that is tweaking the weights of the model and a basic genuine new model version constantly and that new model will deploy to what we call the RL rollout. It basically is a deploy that new version interact with a synthetic environment, a synthetic coding environment or real coding environment and then get the reward back to judge if that model version is good or bad, right? So that's a rough process. And we decouple these two. In the past in large hyperscaler, they run that altogether. If you think about you get 10,000, 100,000 chips all interconnected together through InfiniBand, it's extremely expensive. It's really hard to find. But then you go really quickly and we've designed fully distributed system. We run across five, six data center regions globally and tapping to”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Single thing, and at the same time, we're also pushing to the boundary. We're doing things never existed before. We're bringing systems never existed before because we push the boundary that is unique to this particular setting. Okay, what is unique is here? Typically, if you think about training, training happens, training is very capital intense. And it usually happens in big companies. They have a lot of money. They put those money to buy very expensive training clusters interconnected with each other. Super expensive. And then once you have those expensive large fleet, usually you don't need to think too deeply how to be efficient. You just focus on doing your work. Cursor is like us their startup. Both of us are very capital conscious. We want to be efficient while we don't want to slow down the research innovation. So together we figure out a very smart way to drive their training process is they do massive post training, which is reinforcement learning based. And reinforcement learning, we break that.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what's happening is usually in the early adoption curve of new technology, the early adopters are all hackers. A hacker is not in a bad way. It doesn't have a negative connotation. They have deep expertise in certain areas and they want to control a lot of things versus in the late stage of a new tech adoption curve, it starts to get more accessible to a much bigger cohort user, doesn't have deep expertise, and they need less control. So it always goes into deep control first, usually, and the little control later. So we definitely are aiming towards the later stage as the ultimate 10 one to target, but it's also extremely valuable to understand what is required to get there. So that's why we partner deeply with Cursor. They are the pioneer trying those ideas. They do have researchers from Frontier Labs, and they want to control everything.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Compound with automatic tuning system eventually we think it should all be automated. And then you can see a self-evolving system based on what flow through your product and your product keeps evolving. Your product is live, right? So you keep deploying and launching new features and to interact with your users. That just kind of, it will be totally self-evolving automated system.”
2026-07-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source