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 is likely 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.