Lin Qiao, founder and CEO of Fireworks, discusses custom hardware development in Big Tech, pointing to Meta's multi-year investment in internal silicon like MTIA.
“I think Meta has been building their chips for more than five years, way more than five years.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard
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More from Lin Qiao
PredictionNot checkable as stated
Lin Qiao: AI future will feature millions of specialized models, not AGI
“I really believe the future will not be a few small number of AGI models dominating the world. I really believe the future will be, it may be scary, but I think that's true, it will be millions of specialized models, one per application, per use case.”
Lin QiaoJul 20, 2026▶ 20:59The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10X & Usage Will Explode 100X | Lin Qiao
PredictionOpen · timeframe Jul 2029
Lin Qiao: AI token costs will drop 10x in three years, driving 100x usage
“I do think the cost of token will go down drastically. 10 X cost reduction in the next three years, and this 10 X cost reduction will drive a hundred X usage.”
Lin QiaoJul 20, 2026▶ 0:23The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10X & Usage Will Explode 100X | Lin Qiao
PredictionNot checkable as stated
Lin Qiao: The future of AI is private, specialized intelligence
“We believe the future of the frontier of the intelligence, actually private intelligence, our specialized intelligence.”
Lin QiaoJul 20, 2026▶ 5:22The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10X & Usage Will Explode 100X | Lin Qiao
Insight
Lin Qiao: Fine-tuned open models outperform general models on specialized enterprise tasks
“And the model intelligence has password threshold 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 hill climb towards your eval, and often time, the end result of hill climbi…”
Lin QiaoJul 20, 2026▶ 14:05The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10X & Usage Will Explode 100X | Lin Qiao
Insight
Lin Qiao: Product-market fit no longer guarantees business durability in AI SaaS
“During SaaS time, product market fit and the durable business almost are equivalent to each other. The hardest thing is find product market fit, and then once you find it just scales as fast as you can. Because CPU is a commodity. The infrastructure you build …”
Lin QiaoJul 20, 2026▶ 15:08The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10X & Usage Will Explode 100X | Lin Qiao
Insight
Lin Qiao: AI coding models have eliminated software implementation as a competitive barrier
“In the past, it requires tens of very strong product engineers and PMs to convert from idea to implementation to production scale. Multiple quarters of years of investment. That's a deep mode. And today, one person, a few weeks, can possibly launch their ideas…”
Lin QiaoJul 20, 2026▶ 23:33The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10X & Usage Will Explode 100X | Lin Qiao
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