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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“Yes. You can argue they are the best builded because they deeply understand their use case and they have the evals. So again, my thinking of what is frontier is not just this one model. The frontier could be your special routing mechanism for your business and you decompose that based on, hey, in order to fulfill this task and you need a highly intelligent layer, maybe the most expensive closed models to judge at the highest complexity and usually people will also build subagents to solve smaller problem, then those can go to smaller open models and those can also further being customized to fitting to your special design. So I've seen a lot of people already doing that today. And we also think there's a space to build an automatic routing system that can learn by itself.”
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's very interesting question. I think there were presidents of that if we think about the foundation tier of those general intelligence model as fundamentally a base infrastructure for the big economy to operate around. There has been presence of like PGNE on electricity and gas and so on. So what I don't want to see is there's only one company owns intelligence. I think that doesn't make sense to me. Because there are different, as I said, there are different flavors of intelligence. There's this general common intelligence that benefits everyone, and then there's a specializing intelligence that actually help us advance in history to think differently, to create new paradigm of living or new paradigm of doing business in shaping industry. I don't want that to die because.”
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
“Model qualities start to have step function leaps in there. There's so much more we can do to specialize. So I do see in the world specialization is going to accelerate much faster than the general intelligence part.”
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 are a few layers of model advancement. There's base general IQ advancement. So those will take step functions. So that's why when they release major release or minor releases, right? The major release of stack functions, as you remember beginning of last year, there's all this thinking, the thinking process is new. The model just don't spit out, answer immediately. The model will think by self and spit out answer is much better that way. So that's one step function. There are many step functions we have seen through, but I see those as every year or every three quarters as a major leap. But at the same time, build on top of those the bass based models, and I can see the specialization start to accelerate. Because as I said, it's really like a tree, right? There are so many branches and leaves that can possibly hang on the trunk, and the base”
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 deep understanding, and they all have data. It's not just about how defensive their business is. It's about, hey, oftentimes when they build those assistants, there's a harness integrating and deciding, orchestrating which AI tool to use, which tools calling to. And this is bespook. This is customized. And accuracy of calling those tools in calling to what kind of tools is important. Even that harness need to be co trained with the model powering it. There's just kind of ample examples of driving that business to excellence by owning their own intelligence of how to do that in the workflow layer. So maybe it's a timing. Coding, for example, I think in coding space, cursor probably is one of the pioneer starting to tune that model and now almost all coding companies tune their own 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
“And also, I think legal space is particularly challenging because lawyers are usually more conservative. Legal is also not tolerant at all on arrows, right? Because that's why a lawyer gets paid, right? You need to build a very rock solid case. If something hallucinates and generates wrong judgment, then you're in trouble. So I do think the legal space is a very interesting space to penetrate and these companies are both doing a great job. But on the flip side, I do think both companies are owning proprietary knowledge and information, how to build those assistants to do case studies, to go deep in driving legal research and all this, right? So my understanding of legal so shallow, but there's so many different versions of flavors of cases. So I do think they are in unique position 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
“So here's one observation I had software development, especially SAS space has been significantly disrupted because of the general intelligence of coding. The application development lifecycle has significant collapsed in terms of the timeline and the resource needed. In the past, it requires tens of very strong product engineers and PMs to convert”
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 will be a big impact in the short term. But the beauty of open ecosystem is it's not one provider. That's why it's open. It usually attracts many, many, many interested parties to participate. I do believe in terms of talent density and the resources, I do believe US will be able to build that open system by ourselves and we should. I've seen this happening again in many open systems. There are a thousand flower blossom and that's the beauty of 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
“Need to tune those models to match yours. And I really believe the future will not be a few small number of AGI models, dominant world. I really believe the future will be, it may be scary, but I think that's true. It will be millions of specialized model, one provocation per use case.”
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 this is a huge debate happening right now across the industry. Once the model is open, you can put all kind of guardrails specialized to your business around. I would say to all models. Doesn't matter if you open or close, you should put your own guardware around it. The fundamental reason is the following a model provider will infuse their own judgment, their own taste into the model training process. You cannot guarantee it matches yours. Remember, it goes back to Jensen's comment, there is no specialized general company. Every company is special. Every company will have a special design principle. Every company will have a special taste. Every company will have a special target audience to serve. Because of that specialty, it's guaranteed that the judgment details the design principle from one company with a mismatch with misalign with your company which is solved a special problem. That is a reason.”
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
“Use it however you want, especially Fireworks. We are a specializing intelligence platform. We offer all sorts of tools for you to easily customize the model for one specific use case. And after that model is tuned with high quality, and then we further optimize for inference deployment. Think about fireworks, we think about every single model deployment as one size fits one. It's unique for your workload only. It's optimized for your workload only from quality, speed, cost point of view. So we believe that's absolutely needed because once you think about a production scale of reaching to millions of users, tens of million, billions of users, then even 5% of cost reduction means a lot. It's a massive amount, let alone what we have seen in the past is five times to ten times cost reduction.”
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 could be, but I think at the same time it's just a very different operating principle because for open weight small because it's just there. Basically model acquisition has no cost. Obviously some company train those models and willing to open it up. I know within US there are multiple companies doing that including NVIDIA's training Nimotron. We're working obviously very closely with them. So once the model is there Whoever using those models, there's literally no cost. But there's fundamental cost for the Frontier Labs to investing those models and recoup R&D cost back. So and second is you just cannot customize those general purpose models and you use it as is on top of API. You have no control over versus with open model you have a full control. You can tune however you want.”
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
“A decade ago, when there were startups, and they have so much traffic once they roll out those AI features, they're gonna reach to all their customer base, and they cannot afford to do it. Because their CFO look at their cost proposal, cost forecasting is kind of just no way you can justify this, right? So then it becomes a real problem to all those innovators, hey, we really want to plug in to this new technology, new disruptive technology, but we cannot afford it, and we need to find alternative to be able to afford it. An alternative is to have the control over your open waste model and roll out your own 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
“I think people start to realize it. I remember from two years ago I went to different places and talked about an interesting phenomenon. That doesn't exist in the past in the SAS era. During SAS time, product market fit and a durable business almost equivalent to each other. The hardest thing is fine product market fit, and then once you find it, it just scale as fast as you can. Because CPU is a commodity that infrastructure you build on top of is almost like a commodity. You don't even worry about that as your cocks. Now, product market fit and durable business are two separate concepts. For startups, we have great companies that have pro market fit customers want to pay them and they really value their product, but they cannot scale because once they scale, they could scale into bankruptcy. Have you heard about scaling to bankruptcy? So that's a real problem. It's even a bigger problem for incumbents, so the big companies for digital native, because they have the traffic, they have a huge amount of traffic, they're the winner.”
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 the model intelligence, has password value is much easier to steer, especially with small amount of data. A small amount of unique data, a particular company has, and then we can heel climb towards your eval. And oftentimes the end result of heel climbing is to solve your unique problem with your data, you are better than a general purpose 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
“Close model, the quality significant increase improved over the past two years, to the point both of it. Both of these two streams cross a quality threshold, it can solve so many problems. So within five was obviously redfood on product, we use a open model to drive our recruiting process, candidate sourcing, and the feedback collection, we use OpenModel to even drive some internal finance processes. Obviously, for coding reusable models to help us debug, we have a ton of agents with it in fireworks ourselves, and we are cost conscious. So that is important. Both model categories cross a threshold solve so many variety of problems. Second is open model cross a threshold is so much easier to tune. So be able to steer a model is intelligence, is part of the model 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
“So here's how I view open source. So early on when we found a company, we had pretty deep debate among the co-founders. What do we do? Do we build our own models or we build on top of open models? At that time, OpenModel was not almost like at its infancy. It's a big bat. If we're going to take that direction, it's a huge bat that it's going to do well. But with our PyTorch experience, we believe in the open community. We believe in openness. That's a fundamental principle we operate with. Because openness gave control to the user. Think about open models, right? Once the model is released, you have the full control of the weights. You can change however you want. It's yours. And then you can build on top of it. So that is a fundamental different operating principle that we believe in because of our roots in open source before. So we took that bat and it did pay off in the sense that both open model and”
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 what they build is fantastic because they are basically building power line to distribute a really great source of intelligence that everyone else can build on top of. That's how I view their contribution. If we don't have this fundamental infrastructure, then we will not have all kind of appliances living in our home. I love my coffee machine and it's special branded, right? But without that power, then we don't get to do the things that are fun, that's a unique, that's a special, that ingrained, encode our taste. So I do think that's very, very important. But the question is, is this power line going to replace everything we do? I don't think so.”
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 we just keep talking, you know? It's so easy. We talk about this specialized intelligence. He said one thing to me. Ling, you're right. There's no specialized general company, as in every company is built on a special belief of doing things. Otherwise there's no reason they should exist. It feels yes, logical, but then I start to think back about what he said is profound because every single company is doing something unique that justify their existence. And this something unique is deeply baked into their product design. It is deeply baked into their software design in system building. And that's deeply baked into the data and the interaction with their user and their deep understanding of their user intent, interacting with their product, and engagement so on. All of that is the foundation.”
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
“Recording on Jensen is not really recording. He just started having a conversation with me. I didn't know his crew artist started recording.”
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
“Lifestyle, it's all taste, choices, judgment combined. I think that's what defines us as human. We are not robots. If our future world is going to be ruled by one standard, a taste dictate by one company, we turn ourselves into an army of robots, and that's very depressing to me. I think what separate out homosexual for other species is the creativity, is the deep desire of pursuing new things, of discovering new ways of living that define us as a human being. That part cannot be copied. That's my fundamental belief. That's why in Silicon Valley there's so much creativity across the world, there's so much creativity of building new businesses. I had this interesting conversation with Jensen after his GTC keynote. We actually recorded 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
“That's interesting because I view and thought pig as a company fully believing AGI. The definition of AGI is there's this one model that can solve all the problem in the best way. That to me, that's the definition of AGI. To me, that means you do not need to specialize. And that one model should be able to solve all the problems. It's so intelligent, so much knowledge of every parts of the businesses, every parts of the jobs it can fulfill, then why do you bother specialize? So that itself is a validation that we're living in the world that's not ruled by one principle. We are living a fully diversified world. Give you one example, right? Different region will have different value systems will have different policies, will have different way of conducting 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
“That's a really good question, but why bother specialize intelligence? Why not just use generalized intelligence and you worry less things, right? You just kind of build on top of API that provided by franchise. Wouldn't that be much easier? So the argument is the following. If you think intelligence is a derivative of data, then majority of the data is actually not used for training a general intelligence model. The training data is coming from public internet and the label data. Public internet is very small. Corpus of data compared with words data. Majority of words data actually privately locked inside application, locked inside enterprise. It will never get shared. So that's kind of where Firewall was from the beginning we have been focusing on driving the value.”
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's actually about people. And I decided I want to go to a place I can learn the most of people. And the best company at that time is Facebook. It's a rising star in Silicon Valley. And secretly, I was planning to learn for one year and even go back to do my own business. I stayed there for seven years.”
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 didn't think deeply about that. I always want to have a tech business myself. I actually want to start a business in 2015 because I'm a first generation immigrant and came to US in 2000. I did my PhD in distributed system, computer science, especially focused on databases. And databases very concept, system to build, allowed different objective to optimize for, and pretty much touched after I joined research lab, and pretty much touched every single aspect of processing data. And then I moved to LinkedIn to kind of further it down to build systems and products to be used drive real impact. At that time, I feel I'm ready to start company. I know all the tech. I know what product to build. I have a business proposal. I have a list of people I want to start a company with, and I spend time thinking about it, and I paused because I don't think I have the skill set on people to build a company. It's not just about product, it's not just about tax.”
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 so too. So a funny story after we decided to handshake, he did call me and said he talked with one of his advisors and his advisor questioned him, hey, how many big tech executive have you seen being successful in starting company? Very few. And he told me that. I was surprised, are we breaking our handshake now? No, but since then we work very closely with each other.”
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
“What I don't want to see is there's only one company owns intelligence. I think that doesn't make sense to me. I think last year is a year of coding, and this year is the year of co-work. I do think the cost of token will go down drastically ten x cost reduction in the next three years. And this ten x cost reduction will drive 100x usage. 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 be on the table.”
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