These days, it seems like everyone wants to get in on the action of generative AI. Although the spotlight often shines on big names like OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, and major companies like Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Amazon, there is actually a multitude of startups tackling the generative AI challenge in various ways.
Among these startups is Fireworks.ai. While not as well-known as some of its competitors, the company boasts the largest open source model API with over 12,000 active users. This impressive traction in the open source community has not gone unnoticed, as Fireworks has already raised $25 million in investment.
Lin Qiao, co-founder and CEO of Fireworks, explains that their approach involves fine-tuning existing models to meet the specific needs of a business, rather than starting from scratch. “It can be either off the shelf, open source models or the models we tune or the models our customer can tune by themselves,” Qiao told TechCrunch. Their inference engine API allows developers to seamlessly integrate this technology into their applications and quickly add generative AI capabilities, such as asking questions, with impressive speed, efficiency, and quality results.
What sets Fireworks apart is their ability to empower companies to experiment with multiple models, a crucial advantage in a rapidly evolving market. “Our philosophy here is we want to empower users to iterate and experiment with multiple models and have effective tools to infuse their data into multiple models and test with a product,” Qiao explains.
Cost is also a major factor, as Fireworks keeps their model size limited to between 7 billion and 13 billion tokens, in comparison to the over 1 trillion tokens used in ChatGPT4. While this may limit the number of words the model can understand, it enables developers to focus on smaller, targeted data sets that align with specific business use cases.
Qiao’s background at Meta, where she led the AI platform development team and worked towards building a fast, scalable development engine for Meta’s products and services, uniquely qualifies her to create such a powerful API-based tool. This allows Fireworks to provide companies of any size access to this level of AI technology without the need for a massive amount of engineering resources.
With a $25 million investment led by Benchmark and participation from Sequoia Capital, along with strategic investments from companies like Databricks and Snowflake, Fireworks is poised to make a significant impact within the field of AI. These partnerships with data storage tools like Databricks and Snowflake will enable users to effectively utilize their data and further enhance the capabilities of Firework’s API.
