Lin Qiao
Showing 1–6 of 6 transcripts.
- Sequoia Capital28 min
Post-Training Is How You Keep Your Taste | Fireworks CEO Lin Qiao
Fireworks CEO Linh Nguyen advocates for a strategic industry shift from relying on rented APIs to owning intelligence through deep model customization, enabling companies to preserve unique business judgment while reducing inference costs by five to ten times. This approach utilizes a structured lifecycle of data curation, fine-tuning, and serving loops to transition from generic prompting to specialized models, as demonstrated by success stories like Cursor and niche vertical leaders in healthcare and security. Ultimately, post-training is positioned as the critical mechanism for startups to scale after product-market fit by converting proprietary user data into unclonable domain expertise before high API expenses threaten unit economics.
The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10X & Usage Will Explode 100X | Lin Qiao
Fireworks AI founder Lin Kuao positions the company as an infrastructure-focused platform specializing in customized intelligence rather than general applications, predicting a market shift toward millions of specialized models driven by a tenfold reduction in token costs. With annual recurring revenue currently at $800 million and processing over 40 trillion tokens daily, the firm aims to double its ARR to $1.6 billion by year-end while prioritizing the deployment of open-source models for enterprise workflows. To support this high-velocity growth, Kuao has recruited former Salesforce President George Huang to expand the go-to-market team, emphasizing a strategy that balances aggressive hiring of high-ownership talent with a "Zero KLD" training architecture that ensures numerical equivalence between training and inference.
- RAISE Summit22 min
Fireside Chat with Lin Qiao, CEO & Co-Founder of Fireworks AI | RAISE Summit 2026
At the RAISE conference, Matt Miller of Avantik VC discussed Fireworks AI's specialized intelligence platform with founder Lin Chao, a former Meta AI infrastructure lead who built the company to help businesses own their data-driven models rather than relying on generic APIs. The dialogue highlighted how fine-tuning open-source models on proprietary data allows companies to reduce inference costs by up to tenfold while creating durable competitive moats against commoditized application development. Together, they outlined a strategic shift where long-term business survival depends on continuous model customization and the deployment of millions of specialized models tailored to specific use cases.
- RAISE Summit22 min
Lin Qiao, Co-Founder & CEO, Fireworks AI: Open Models: The future of AI agent development
Fireworks CEO Lin positions 2025 as a pivotal year for AI agents, highlighting the platform's deployment for major enterprises like Cursor, Uber, and UiPath through a unique "data flying wheel" strategy that aligns model distributions with proprietary product data. The service scales 5 trillion tokens daily across 1,000 models while utilizing multilora compression and reinforcement fine-tuning to achieve up to 15x performance gains in coding and research tasks. By offering enterprise-grade security and bringing custom models to production with 100x faster iteration speeds, Fireworks enables organizations to transform AI from a utility into a core intellectual property asset.
- Sequoia Capital10 min
How to Scale AI Application Inference 100x ft. Fireworks’ Lin Qiao
Fireworks addresses the critical gap between generic model capabilities and specific application needs by co-optimizing inference across quality, speed, and concurrency for over 100,000 variables. This strategic approach reduces inference costs by 10x to 100x through virtual cloud infrastructure that dynamically selects hardware and aligns data distributions, enabling rapid enterprise scaling. The platform has already demonstrated success in transforming high-cost operations into sustainable models, exemplified by a food chain expanding to 1,000 shops and a software firm serving 25 million developers within three months.
- Sequoia Capital39 min
Fireworks Founder Lin Qiao on the Power of Small Models to Democratize AI Use Cases
Lin Qiao, Sonya Huang, Pat Grady, Lynn Tiao
Founded in 2022 by former Meta PyTorch leaders Lynn Diao and others, Fireworks is a SaaS platform dedicated to compressing AI model deployment timelines from years to days through a specialized, PyTorch-native infrastructure. The company automates complex optimization tasks like quantization and semantic caching using handwritten CUDA kernels to enable high-performance, low-latency inference for small model stacks and fine-tuned enterprise workloads. By targeting the gap between research and production, Fireworks facilitates the migration of startups and traditional enterprises away from generic experimentation toward scalable, cost-efficient custom models that compete with larger monolithic systems.