Lin Qiao is the Co-Founder and CEO of Fireworks AI, the leading specialized intelligence and AI inference platform that last week raised $1.5BN at a whopping $17BN valuation. With just 200 people, the company has hit $1BN in ARR and expects to hit $2BN before the end of the year. Prior to Fireworks, Lin spent several years at Meta including on the founding team of PyTorch.
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Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
02:00 – Why Starting a Company at 48 Was an Advantage
03:47 – The AI Layer Everyone Is Overlooking
09:49 – Is AGI Really the End Goal?
11:40 – Open Source vs Frontier Models: Who Wins?
14:30 – Are AI Giants Massively Overvalued?
17:48 – Why Open Models Could Beat Closed AI
19:23 – Should We Trust Chinese AI Models?
22:18 – Do AI Startups Need to Build Their Own Models?
26:49 – Will AI Model Breakthroughs Ever Slow Down?
29:03 – Why One Company Should Never Control Intelligence
32:47 – The Secret Behind Cursor’s Explosive Growth
37:33 – Is AI Coding Already Yesterday’s Biggest Trend?
41:36 – The AI Infrastructure Race Is Just Getting Started
46:32 – How Cheap Will AI Become?
54:07 – Hypergrowth vs Profit: Why Margins Can Wait
59:30 – Can the West Keep Up With China’s Infrastructure Speed?
01:01:04 – Why AI Hardware Depreciates Faster Than Ever
01:04:45 – Why AI Will Create More Jobs, Not Fewer
01:08:35 – The Biggest Mistakes AI Founders Are Making
01:16:55 – Why Great Leaders Stay Close to the Work
01:18:44: Quick-Fire Round
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