Assertion certainty 3/5 debate potential 3/5

Cheah: RWKV Architecture Could Reduce Inference Costs by 1,000x

Eugene Cheah · Featherless: $3.6M Revenue Running 6,700 Open Source AI Models — Eugene Cheah · Jul 1, 2026 · at 5:58

Eugene Cheah, co-founder and CEO of Featherless AI, discusses his background experimenting with foundation models in the open-source RWKV community.

0:00 / 0:06exact quote · 6.7s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Like this new AI architecture has the potential of reducing inference costs by over a thousand X.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Eugene Cheah

Opinion
Cheah: Open Models Now Match Claude Sonnet and GPT-4o Mini
“So, and the, this growing collection of open models includes some of the best models that are already on par or surpass, let's say, Plot Sonnet or even GPT-A for Mini.”
Eugene Cheah Jul 1, 2026 ▶ 5:19 Featherless: $3.6M Revenue Running 6,700 Open Source AI Models — Eugene Cheah
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Cheah: Global AI Market Will Segment into Domestic Sovereign Models
“So they are going to the direction of highly tailored sovereign AI models for the domestic market. And we actually see this happening more and more. So for Cohear, they will service the Canadian market. For the US market is going to be served by OpenAI Entropi…”
Eugene Cheah Jul 1, 2026 ▶ 15:08 Featherless: $3.6M Revenue Running 6,700 Open Source AI Models — Eugene Cheah
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cheah: Long-Tail Fine-Tuned Models Drive 50% of Featherless Workload
“You see, most providers, they only provide, let's say, less than a hundred models. That covers 50% of our inference work. It's the bottom 50% where they run all these interesting fine-tuned models that people came on board for.”
Eugene Cheah Jul 1, 2026 ▶ 6:34 Featherless: $3.6M Revenue Running 6,700 Open Source AI Models — Eugene Cheah
Disclosure
Featherless Targets Startups Burning $100K Monthly on OpenAI and Anthropic
“We also realized that there is a lot of money on the table right now where you can go after the startups that, hey, I just built my entire startup or SMB on OpenAI or Entropic, and I'm burning a 100,000 dollars a month. And I do not know what I was doing. And …”
Eugene Cheah Jul 1, 2026 ▶ 10:40 Featherless: $3.6M Revenue Running 6,700 Open Source AI Models — Eugene Cheah
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Featherless Won Multiple Contracts by Exclusively Hosting the StepFun Model
“The step one model is a particularly popular model for us that easily ship several contracts for us on this model alone. And no one else is.”
Eugene Cheah Jul 1, 2026 ▶ 13:05 Featherless: $3.6M Revenue Running 6,700 Open Source AI Models — Eugene Cheah
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cheah: Featherless AI's Largest Customer Pays $1M to $2M Annually
“So currently the biggest will be around one to two million dollars a year, which may sound extremely large, but when you actually peel behind the layers, it only comes to around like five, six of the largest servers you see in the market.”
Eugene Cheah Jul 1, 2026 ▶ 16:12 Featherless: $3.6M Revenue Running 6,700 Open Source AI Models — Eugene Cheah
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 2,600 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.