Lin Qiao
Co-Founder & CEO, Fireworks AI. On 3 shows, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveengineerscientist@lqiao ↗LinkedIn ↗fireworks.ai ↗
Lin Qiao previously served as a Senior Director of Engineering at Meta, where she led the engineering teams behind the PyTorch framework. In 2022, she co-founded Fireworks AI, a generative AI platform focused on inference and model serving.
3shows
3appearances
66statements
14resolved
11supported
1contradicted
79%fully supported
24said about them ↓ Everything Lin Qiao said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
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.”
Specialized open-source expert models will outperform one-size-fits-all closed-source models
“And that's our prediction is With specialization, there will be a lot of expert models, really, really good, and even better than, like, one size fits all open source closed source model.”
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 predicts a 10x AI cost reduction yields 100x more applications
“If this bar can be lowered by 10 times, you can imagine there's so many more, it will be hundred times more applications enter the, this arena to create a brand new experience to end consumers and prosumers. And by that, we'll see a much bigger consumption acr…”
For AI applications, moats lie in curated data rather than user experience
“Their mode is probably not the user experience, but because it's very easy to copy. Anyone can study the product and copy. Their mode is data.”
Lin Qiao: The future of AI modeling belongs to open-source models
“The future of the future of modeling sits on open model side. And I believe that side is gonna be much more active in creating those hundreds or maybe thousands of expert models that is specialized delivering much better quality in certain domain.”
AI inference matters more than training because it scales with global population
“Our prediction is for those kind of applications, the inference is much more important than training. Because inference scale is proportional to the upliminal world population. And training. Training scale is proportional to the number of researchers.”
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.”
The other half of the tape: Lin Qiao's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 23 times in 11 episodes across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 20Shawn Wang 1Eric Vishria 1
Statements about Lin Qiao, by other people (1)
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 21
Latent Space 2
2026 20 mentions in 8 episodes 3 per episode
- The AI Bubble WILL Burst | Should we be fearful of Chinese Open-Source | Jerry Murdock
- Should the US Ban Chinese Open-Source Models | OpenRouter's Chance To Sell | Stripe Buying PayPal
- Will Open-Source Threaten Anthropic's Business & Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | Matt Murphy
- ClickHouse CEO: AI Margins Need to Improve | Revenue Concentration Should be a Concern
- OpenRouter CEO: Why Chinese Open Models Are Beating the US | Why Enterprises Fear OpenAI & Anthropic
- Arena CEO: There Will be a $100BN US Open-Source Model & Data is a Trillion Dollar Market
- Mercor Head of Product on Revenue Concentration from Frontier Labs
- How to Build Your Own Data Center & Why Every Startup Should Do It
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2024 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Lin's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Fireworks AI | 1 | 39 | 83% 5/6 | full record on 20VC → |
 MADLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Fireworks AI | 1 | 15 | 75% 3/4 | full record on the MAD Podcast → |
| LATENT SPACELEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Fireworks AI | 1 | 12 | 75% 3/4 | full record on Latent Space → |