Fal co-ounder and CEO Burkay Gur and head of engineering Batuhan Taskaya join a16z general partner Jennifer Li to discuss how they built a generative AI inference platform that's optimized for speed, performance, and user experience. If you've been experimenting with image, video, and audio models, the chances are you've been both blown away by how good they're becoming, and also a little perturbed by how long they can take to generate. If you've been using a platform like Fal, however, your experience on the latter point might be more positive. In this episode, Fal cofounder and CEO Burkay Gur and head of engineering Batuhan Taskaya join a16z general partner Jennifer Li to discuss how they built an inference platform — or, as they call it, a generative media cloud — that's optimized for speed, performance, and user experience. These are core features for a great product, yes, and also ones borne of necessity as the early team obsessively engineered around its meager GPU capacity at the height of the AI infrastructure crunch. But this is more than a story about infrastructure. As you'll hear, they also delve into sales and hiring strategy; the team's overall excitement over these emerging modalities; and the trends they're seeing as competition in the world of video models, especially, heats up. Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence, including articles, projects, and more podcasts, here: https://a16z.com/ai/ Follow everyone on X here: https://x.com/burkaygur https://x.com/isidentical https://x.com/jenniferhli Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 01:06 Co-founder of Fal.ai, Burkay Gur, Discusses the Origins of Fal 01:44 Recruiting Batuhan Taskaya, Mascot of Fal 03:00 Batuhan Shares His Background With Python and Excitement Around Fal 04:53 “Technical Curiosity” and Tackling Use Cases” 08:24 Optimization, With Only 8 GPUs 09:56 Where We Are With: Diffusion Models vs Language Models 12:27 AI Video, Adoption and Capabilities 14:19 Creative Use Cases With Prompting and Finetuning 16:57 Finetuning Workflows and Demands 18:05 Winners In the Image Camp and Video Camp 20:30 Determining Which Models To Serve To Developers 21:31 The Strategy Behind Fal and the Infrastructure 24:45 Critical Infrastructure Pieces 27:13 Optimization That Has Delivered the Largest Gain 28:05 Is Speed Is A Moat? 29:00 Structuring the Team (Balancing Engineering and GTM) 31:42 “In Order To Win, You Have To Win The Market” 34:17 Being Customer Centric With Open Channels, Company Culture 35:52 The Future Of Generative Video, Distribution and Opportunities 36:31 Undiscovered Areas and Use Cases