Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy · Tuesday, August 11, 2026
The speaker claims that running large AI models (2-4 trillion parameters) is difficult and that Firework achieves a 5x performance advantage over cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP. This difference is attributed to expertise in efficiently running these models, not just the open-source models or hardware used.
“One really interesting thing is, these models are big. These are 2 trillion, 3 trillion, 4 trillion parameters models. It turns out running those models is damn hard. And running them efficiently is like super hard.”
“The performance difference for our, a Firework versus a cloud provider is like 5x. And that is just the speed performance.”
“What I've taken away on it was, wow, this stuff is actually really hard to run. It's just really hard to run. And there's a lot of expertise involved in doing that.”