Should American companies be worried about Chinese open source AI models? Lin Qiao, CEO of Fireworks, doesn't think so. In this episode, she joins Lukas Biewald to talk about why she believes the industry is at a turning point, one that calls for more open intelligence, not less. They cover how Fireworks now processes more tokens a day than OpenAI's API, why she thinks the future belongs to specialized models built on private company data rather than general-purpose ones, and why she believes OpenAI and Anthropic should be open-sourcing their own models too. Connect with us here: Lin Qiao: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lin-qiao-22248b4/ Fireworks: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fireworks-ai/ Lukas Biewald: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lbiewald/ Weights and Biases: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wandb/ (00:00) Trailer (00:53) Introduction to Lin Qiao (01:51) Becoming a founder later in life (03:00) Why she joined Facebook to learn company building (05:33) Starting Fireworks to have industry-wide impact (09:07) Raising $61.5 million at $17.5 billion valuation (09:45) Specialized intelligence vs general intelligence (13:36) Processing more tokens than OpenAI's API (17:07) Why frontier labs don't prioritize fine-tuning (23:36) How reinforcement learning works for customization (28:53) Jensen Huang: there's no specialized general company (33:39) Unit economics and scaling to bankruptcy (41:35) Security trade-offs between open and closed models (44:24) Should American companies use Chinese models (47:00) Should OpenAI and Anthropic open source their models (50:51) Day zero launches and fixing DeepSeek bugs (55:04) What is Fireworks' long-term moat (01:12:39) The biggest surprise of starting a company