40 trillion tokens per day
Fireworks processes more than 40 trillion tokens per day, the majority from customised rather than off-the-shelf models.
Snapshot · The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Are OpenAI and Anthropic Overvalued? The Open-Source AI Reality | How Token Costs Will Fall 10x And Usage Will Explode 100x | The Future Is Not One AGI; It's Millions of Specialised Models with Lin Qiao, Founder and CEO @ Fireworks
Explore episode
Jul 20, 2026
Where this was said
Will the Multi-Model World Create a $100BN Routing Layer?
At 36:54 · chapter starts 28:00
One of the most technically rich chapters in the episode. Lin explains that early AI tech adopters are hackers who want control, and Cursor — flush with frontier lab researchers — is the prime example. The problem they solved together is profound: hyperscalers run RL training on 100,000 interconnected chips. Cursor and Fireworks had no such cluster. Their solution was to decouple the trainer (which updates model weights) from the RL rollout (which deploys the model into a synthetic environment to collect rewards), distributing the system across five or six global data centre regions and syncing fresh model weights efficiently enough that the reward signal stays numerically sound. This distributed design enabled Cursor's recent model launches without a hyperscaler-level budget.
Cursor's RL Training System Built with Fireworks
Fireworks CTO Dima embedded at Cursor for months to build a distributed reinforcement learning infrastructure that decouples the trainer from RL rollout across six global data centre regions. This let a capital-constrained startup run training jobs that previously required 100,000 interconnected chips at a hyperscaler.
Coding Was Last Year. Co-Work Is This Year.
Lin Qiao sees 2024 as the year of coding AI and 2025 as the year of co-work. Co-work is dramatically more diverse than coding — spanning legal, finance, healthcare, customer support, and consumer-facing AI — and Fireworks is already landing customers across all of those verticals.
40 Trillion Tokens a Day — and 20–100x Growth Coming
Fireworks processes more than 40 trillion tokens a day today. Lin Qiao projects that number could be 20x to 100x higher by end of next year. At those volumes, worries about a CapEx bubble look completely backwards.
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