Lin Qiao, CEO of AI inference platform Fireworks AI, responds to podcast host Swyx noting the small size of Fireworks AI's engineering team compared to its product scope.
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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.”
Insight
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.”
Insight
Compelling GenAI applications require compound AI systems spanning multiple modalities
“In order to really build a compelling application on top of JNI, we need a compound AI system. Compact AI system basically is going to have multiple models across modalities along with APIs, whether it's public APIs, internal proprietary APIs, storage systems,…”
Disclosure
Fireworks AI will release a reasoning model inspired by OpenAI's o1
“So another announcement is we will also announce a, our next
Declarative system is going to be appear as a model that has extremely high quality, and this model is inspired by O-one announcement from OpenAI.
You should see that by the time we announce this o…”
Opinion
Pre-training on human data is hitting limits; synthetic data is required
“So I think on the data side, we're approaching the limit and the only data to increase that is synthetic generated data.”
Assertion Partly supported
Fireworks AI serves fine-tuned LoRA adapters at base model pricing
“We wrote multi LoRa last year, actually, and we actually have this function for a long time and many people have been using it, but it's not well known that, oh, if you find your model, you don't need to use on demand. If you find your model is LoRa. You can u…”