Lin Qiao has seen firsthand how latest technology drives massive transformation every few years. She graduated in 2005 with a Ph.D. in distribution systems and database management systems, worked as a software engineer for IBM, moved to LinkedIn, and then joined Facebook (now Meta). At each stop, she saw the cycles unfold in real time.
Cloud computing has modified all the things. Mobile computing did this too. When it got here to Facebook, the company was running out of space for storing – because latest artificial intelligence systems were allowing people to create much more content, and artificial intelligence was creating a lot of things itself. Artificial intelligence was used in videoconferencing. Just like rating search engines like google. All sorts of services began to appear online, supported by artificial intelligence. “It was clear to me that artificial intelligence would power the next generation of technology,” he says. “There’s a lot of AI going on and people don’t realize it.”
Generative AI can create images, text, audio and more. It can learn from the data it collects and then create much more. In October 2022 – a month before the release of ChatGPT, showing what generative AI technology can do for information, workplaces and more, for higher or for worse – Qiao reported an increase in productivity and decision-making in creating generative AI products with order of magnitude. People realized the power of this technology and tried to do more things with it. She wanted to provide developers with a customizable framework to make this work easier. For this purpose, she founded her company AI fireworks. It enables customers to build generative AI products with easy prompts or helps enterprise customers build in more complex ways. One client arrange a paralegal to find precedents. The same technology might be used to teach people to speak a foreign language. It can generate cartoons, postcards, or more artistic layouts – it might probably mainly be used in any way people can imagine.
“The GenAI market is changing so quickly that the timeline is highly compressed from people prototyping to early scaling and large-scale production across all different industry segments,” he says. “We provide the operational infrastructure for application engineers and product developers.”
All of this made Qiao a finalist on our Entrepreneur 2024 Top 20 Innovative Leaders list.
Last yr you announced closer cooperation with corporations providing equipment, data and models. You also currently work with enterprise capital firms Benchmark and Sequoia.
We just did a Series B this yr. We raised $55 million, for a total of $77 million, at a valuation of $552 million. As of February 2024, the platform’s user base has grown from 12,000 developers to 23,000.
What happened to cause this growth to skyrocket?
Companies began providing opportunities for people to higher use GenAI products, and people began doing more with GenAI products. Many users stopped playing with images and began seriously using them in production to improve the performance of a latest application or product.
Another reason is that folks are more aware of Fireworks AI. We have launched a self-service platform. You don’t even have to talk to us. You can try it yourself. That really brought a lot of individuals to us.
It appears like you have developed the right technology that shall be ready when the business community and society adopts GenAI technology.
That’s exactly what happened last yr. We have all the things from digital natives to traditional corporations, and in each cases the market has grown faster.
I think there is an interesting feeling of fear. There is fear of what artificial intelligence will do to our lives. Will it’s good or bad? These are many questions at once. But on the other hand, business owners have realized that if they do not move fast enough, they are going to develop into obsolete. They won’t be as fast as their competitors and they are going to lose the match.