Lin Qiao

Co-founder & CEO, Fireworks Ai

Search every verified Lin Qiao interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. In an October 2026 interview following the HYSTA conference, Qiao Lin, co-founder and CEO of Fireworks AI, discussed the company's recent releases and his views on the AI industry. He described the September 22nd launch of Fireworks' Specialized Integrity Index as a tool to aggregate unique, private benchmarks into a single index, and introduced the company's proprietary model, Ember-One, released on September 23rd. Lin stated that Ember-One is designed to reduce the length of its reasoning process by two times, thereby halving costs while maintaining effectiveness. Lin also shared his perspective on AI business challenges, arguing that product-market fit does not guarantee scalability due to high infrastructure costs, which he said can lead small companies to "scale into bankruptcy." He emphasized the concept of "Specialized Intelligence," which he defined as the transformation of private enterprise data into unique intelligent agents, contrasting it with general intelligence. Additionally, Lin discussed organizational structure as a key challenge for scaling, noting that Fireworks maintains a flat hierarchy and is rethinking traditional structures to handle what he described as "superlinear demand."