The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 39 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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 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 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 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 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 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 Qiao: Fireworks runs distributed RL across 5-6 global data center regions
“We've designed a fully distributed system. We run across five, six data center regions globally, and tap into scattered GPUs, and they are able to run massive jobs, our jobs.”
Lin Qiao: All major AI coding companies use Fireworks infrastructure
“I think all major coding companies are on us.”
Qiao: Fireworks daily token count could grow 20x-100x by next year
“Anywhere ranging from 20 to a hundred X could be possible.”
Lin Qiao: Nations will build sovereign AI models like power grids
“I definitely see that possibility. I also see, if we think about the general intelligence model as the electricity layer, as a power line, every country should own their own power line, right?”
Qiao: AI market will shift from token maxing to ROI maxing
“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 maxing is just a thing in time, but we're quickly moving to ROI maxing, which is about…”
Qiao: Every company will own its custom AI intelligence within three years
“I really see people will own their, every single company will own their own intelligence as a must-have. It's not optional.”
Lin Qiao: A single-company monopoly on AI makes no sense
“What I don't want to see is there's only one company owns intelligence. I think that doesn't make sense to me.”
Lin Qiao: Enterprise data will never be shared with third parties
“It will never get shared with anyone else because this is company's proprietary IP.”
Qiao: Anthropic relies on a single-AGI belief over specialization
“I view Anthropic as a company fully believing AGI.”
Lin Qiao: US can build its own open-source AI ecosystem if China restricts access
“I do believe, in terms of talent density and resources, I do believe U.S. Will be able to build that open system by ourselves, and we should.”
Qiao: Standalone model router services like OpenRouter won't be needed long-term
“You probably don't. We're not there yet, but I do think this is, this could be area of innovation.”
Lin Qiao: Fireworks processes over 40 trillion tokens daily
“Today we process more than 40 trillion tokens a day. So majority of those tokens are coming from a customized model, not from off-the-shelf models, are coming from a customized model.”
Qiao: Cursor was a single-digit million-dollar company before 1000x growth
“I would say Curso 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 grew by a hundred, a thousand X over two years.”
Qiao: Fireworks could optimize gross margins now but chooses rapid expansion
“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.”
The AI Industry Lacks Systems Designed for 10-Trillion Parameter Models
“Great system designed for 10 trillion parameter models today.”
Lin Qiao: token costs will fall drastically and cheaper infrastructure will invite far more usage
“I do think the cost of token will go down drastically. High price will invite a lot of people coming in to solve the problem, and it will invite competition. Competition will bring down the cost, and then eventually will lead into a very economical solution, r…”
Lin Qiao: Collaborative AI tools define the current market shift
“I think last year is the year of coding, and this year is the year of co-work.”
Lin Qiao: Fireworks AI will not enter the application layer
“We absolutely are not going to move into application layer. Very clear to us.”
Lin Qiao: Most world data is private enterprise data, not public internet
“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 comp…”
Lin Qiao: Corporate Uniqueness and User Data Intelligence Cannot Be Replicated Externally
“Every single company is doing something unique that justify their existence, and this something unique is deeply baked into their product design, is deeply baked into their software design and system building, and that's deeply baked into the data and the inte…”
Lin Qiao: Fireworks has achieved 5x to 10x inference cost reductions
“What we have seen in the past is five times to 10 times cost reduction.”
Lin Qiao: Almost all AI coding startups now fine-tune custom models
“In coding space, Cursor probably is one of the pioneers starting to tune their model, and now almost all coding companies tune their own models.”
Lin Qiao: Major AI base IQ leaps will occur every 9-12 months
“I see those as every year or every three quarters, there's a major leap.”
Qiao: Enterprise AI frontier is routing architecture, not single models
“So again, my thinking of what is the 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, mayb…”
Qiao: AI model routing will evolve into fully automated self-learning systems
“We also think there's a space to build a automatic routing system that can learn by itself, and that 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 y…”
Fireworks achieves exact bit equivalence between AI training and inference
“Between the training system and the inference system, when models move over, We have bit equivalence. So, as in, the numerics are fully the same. We do not lose a bit of accuracy.”
Lin Qiao: Legal AI market consolidated from many startups to two
“Take legal, for example. I was on a dinner table, and interesting, it seems like there were a lot of those companies around two years ago, but now it's pretty much two.”
Qiao: Generative AI workloads are too dynamic to justify custom silicon
“We're still in the early stage of workload maturity for now to warrant a chip that will be durable.”
Fireworks AI uses open-source models internally for hiring, finance, and coding
“So within, ah, within Firewalls, obviously, we dock for our own product. We use OpenModel to drive our recruiting process, candidate sourcing, and the feedback collection. We use OpenModel to even drive some internal finance processes. Obviously, for coding, w…”
Lin Qiao: AI hardware vendors now release three SKUs per year
“And now within a year from one vendor alone, we have three SKUs.”