We have a full slate of upcoming events: AI Engineer London, AWS Re:Invent in Las Vegas, and now Latent Space LIVE! at NeurIPS in Vancouver and online. Sign up to join and speak! We are still taking questions for our next big recap episode! Submit questions and messages on Speakpipe here for a chance to appear on the show! We try to stay close to the inference providers as part of our coverage, as our podcasts with Together AI and Replicate will attest: However one of the most notable pull quotes from our very well received Braintrust episode was his opinion that open source model adoption has NOT gone very well and is actually declining in relative market share terms (it is of course increasing in absolute terms): Today’s guest, Lin Qiao, would wholly disagree. Her team of Pytorch/GPU experts are wholly dedicated toward helping you serve and finetune the full stack of open source models from Meta and others, across all modalities (Text, Audio, Image, Embedding, Vision-understanding), helping customers like Cursor and Hubspot scale up open source model inference both rapidly and affordably. Fireworks has emerged after its successive funding rounds with top tier VCs as one of the leaders of the Compound AI movement, a term first coined by the Databricks/Mosaic gang at Berkeley AI and adapted as “Composite AI” by Gartner: Replicating o1 We are the first podcast to discuss Fireworks’ f1, their proprietary replication of OpenAI’s o1. This has become a surprisingly hot area of competition in the past week as both Nous Forge and Deepseek r1 have launched competitive models. Full Video Podcast Like and subscribe! Timestamps * 00:00:00 Introductions * 00:02:08 Pre-history of Fireworks and PyTorch at Meta * 00:09:49 Product Strategy: From Framework to Model Library * 00:13:01 Compound AI Concept and Industry Dynamics * 00:20:07 Fireworks' Distributed Inference Engine * 00:22:58 OSS Model Support and Competitive Strategy * 00:29:46 Declarative System Approach in AI * 00:31:00 Can OSS replicate o1? * 00:36:51 Fireworks f1 * 00:41:03 Collaboration with Cursor and Speculative Decoding * 00:46:44 Fireworks quantization (and drama around it) * 00:49:38 Pricing Strategy * 00:51:51 Underrated Features of Fireworks Platform * 00:55:17 Hiring Transcript Alessio [00:00:00]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner at CTO at Danceable Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host, Swyx founder, Osmalayar. Swyx [00:00:11]: Hey, and today we're in a very special studio inside the Fireworks office with Lin Qiang, CEO of Fireworks. Welcome. Yeah. Lin [00:00:20]: Oh, you should welcome us. Swyx [00:00:21]: Yeah, welcome. Yeah, thanks for having us. It's unusual to be in the home of a startup, but it's also, I think our relationship is a bit unusual compared to all our normal guests. Definitely. Lin [00:00:34]: Yeah. I'm super excited to talk about very interesting topics in that space with both of you. Swyx [00:00:41]: You just celebrated your two-year anniversary yesterday. Lin [00:00:43]: Yeah, it's quite a crazy journey. We circle around and share all the crazy stories across these two years, and it has been super fun. All the way from we experienced Silicon Valley bank run to we delete some data that shouldn't be deleted operationally. We went through a massive scale where we actually are busy getting capacity to, yeah, we learned to kind of work with it as a team with a lot of brilliant people across different places to join a company. It has really been a fun journey. Alessio [00:01:24]: When you started, did you think the technical stuff will be harder or the bank run and then the people side? I think there's a lot of amazing researchers that want to do companies and it's like the hardest thing is going to be building the product and then you have all these different other things. So, were you surprised by what has been your experience the most? Lin [00:01:42]: Yeah, to be honest with you, my focus