Lin Qiao is the Co-Founder and CEO of Fireworks AI, the leading specialized intelligence and AI inference platform that last week raised $1.5BN at a whopping $17BN valuation. With just 200 people, the company has hit $1BN in ARR and expects to hit $2BN before the end of the year. Prior to Fireworks, Lin spent several years at Meta including on the founding team of PyTorch. ----------------------------------------------- Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 02:00 - Why Starting a Company at 48 Was an Advantage 03:47 - The AI Layer Everyone Is Overlooking 09:49 - Is AGI Really the End Goal? 11:40 - Open Source vs Frontier Models: Who Wins? 14:30 - Are AI Giants Massively Overvalued? 17:48 - Why Open Models Could Beat Closed AI 19:23 - Should We Trust Chinese AI Models? 22:18 - Do AI Startups Need to Build Their Own Models? 26:49 - Will AI Model Breakthroughs Ever Slow Down? 29:03 - Why One Company Should Never Control Intelligence 32:47 - The Secret Behind Cursor's Explosive Growth 37:33 - Is AI Co...