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The Future of AI Video: How Fal.ai is Making AI Video Faster & Easier

The Future of AI Video: How Fal.ai is Making AI Video Faster & Easier

21 segments available

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

Segments Timeline

1
0:00 - 1:06
1:06 duration223 words

Introduction

"In general, there is still a lot of demand for image models and there seems to be some kind of convergence on like quality, but then each model really has its own differentiation. With video, we're ea..."

2
1:06 - 1:46
0:39 duration126 words

Co-founder of Fal.ai, Burkay Gur, Discusses the Origins of Fal

"we started about 4 years ago the origin story is I I used to work at Coinbase and they had a lot of infra issues with respect to machine learning and fraud was a big problem there so I kind of grew up..."

3
1:46 - 3:01
1:15 duration247 words

Recruiting Batuhan Taskaya, Mascot of Fal

"2021 wind shift happening on on the multimedia side. But before we go there, how did you meet and recruit Bottoan, the foul guy now? He is the the mascot uh on Twitter of of F. Yeah, we're both from T..."

4
3:01 - 4:53
1:52 duration402 words

Batuhan Shares His Background With Python and Excitement Around Fal

"contributor in this Helen acquisition what were you doing in Poland I went there for a university but I dropped out in like the third week or something was preparing to leave Poland go back to Turkey ..."

5
4:53 - 8:26
3:32 duration684 words

“Technical Curiosity” and Tackling Use Cases”

"back to the pivot into the direction of generative media in 2021, all the rage was about large language models. Yes. But when you and Gorham saw this shift, you picked generative media, which is image..."

6
8:26 - 9:56
1:30 duration319 words

Optimization, With Only 8 GPUs

"lot of compute and iterations out of just eight GPUs where did you even start with optimization for me like this was my first time entry into machine learning performance space as Brookai mentioned I ..."

7
9:56 - 12:27
2:30 duration507 words

Where We Are With: Diffusion Models vs Language Models

"Back then a lot of the inference platforms and Python clouds if that was even a thing are agnostic of different type of workloads. But today we're certainly seeing file emerging as the leader of gener..."

8
12:27 - 14:21
1:54 duration378 words

AI Video, Adoption and Capabilities

"definitely and you you put out a prediction that 2025 will be the tipping point of AI video of course announced it quite a bit earlier than that but now we are seeing a plethora of video models what's..."

9
14:21 - 16:57
2:36 duration528 words

Creative Use Cases With Prompting and Finetuning

"side on the modality bifurcation is given these are different workflows and different workflows too like people are using image video models more as a chain workflow where you process image remove bac..."

10
16:57 - 18:05
1:07 duration232 words

Finetuning Workflows and Demands

"Talking about the fine-tuning workflows and demand, we have seen a lot of difference in just like people focusing on more large scale pre-training or large scale post-training workflows where a lot of..."

11
18:05 - 20:30
2:24 duration464 words

Winners In the Image Camp and Video Camp

"Talking about the open and closed source models, who is winning in both the image camp and also the video camp and how does th prepare for both sides of workloads? Yeah. So, the winner is literally ch..."

12
20:30 - 21:31
1:01 duration224 words

Determining Which Models To Serve To Developers

"do you stay pretty agnostic for all the model uniqueness and quality or do you also poke around whenever a new model launch to figure out if this model is uniquely good at this thing and just like gen..."

13
21:31 - 24:45
3:13 duration621 words

The Strategy Behind Fal and the Infrastructure

"on this point more and more file start to become this two-sided marketplace where on one side you have a lot of this developer attention customers and users that have unique use cases that coming to y..."

14
24:45 - 27:13
2:27 duration514 words

Critical Infrastructure Pieces

"Let's talk about that aspect. Speed is literally running through everything about the company. How you catch up with every new model launches, how you run every model, open source especially optimize ..."

15
27:13 - 28:05
0:52 duration190 words

Optimization That Has Delivered the Largest Gain

"those which optimization if you can recollect or recall has delivered the largest performance gain for infrastructure I guess distributed file system caching was one of the biggest points you know jus..."

16
28:05 - 29:00
0:55 duration201 words

Is Speed Is A Moat?

"And do you fundamentally believe speed is a mode? However, you optimized for the model to run really fast and also how fast you can I guess optimize to the best performance point possible in that time..."

17
29:00 - 31:44
2:43 duration517 words

Structuring the Team (Balancing Engineering and GTM)

"and how do you structure the team to keep up with what's happening I guess both at the big labs but also at the there are probably at this point a dozen or two dozens of generative media companies are..."

18
31:44 - 34:17
2:33 duration472 words

“In Order To Win, You Have To Win The Market”

"because it's so it's so fascinating to me how obsessed of these 28 engineers are at the business problems because it's very rare to find when you're already so deep into the infrastructure and perform..."

19
34:17 - 35:52
1:35 duration359 words

Being Customer Centric With Open Channels, Company Culture

"we we are like really customer centric when consider a company. I think we might be one of the company like we might in the in the top leaderboard of Slack connects across all Slack users. You know we..."

20
35:52 - 36:32
0:40 duration144 words

The Future Of Generative Video, Distribution and Opportunities

"Last question. If you put yourself a year or two ahead in 2026 or 2027, if generative video do not take off or as big as it is, what would be the reason that caused the slop? I think it's impossible t..."

21
36:32 - 38:19
1:46 duration311 words

Undiscovered Areas and Use Cases

"opportunities but not enough developers are paying attention or figured out that these could be use cases or these could be interesting products to build on top of file that you feel is underrated or ..."