fal's Gorkem Yurtseven says image models beat a price war

Gorkem Yurtseven, co-founder and CTO of the AI company fal, said on the podcast Sourcery that fal began with a different business. He spoke in an episode posted Tuesday.

Why you'd care

For most people, this is about where AI images and video may come from. fal runs the computing behind them for other companies. So the apps you use could depend on it.

Yurtseven said fal started in 2021 to help teams run Python data work in the cloud. Then ChatGPT and image tools like Stable Diffusion arrived. He said the team of five or six people had little money. They didn't want to sell chatbot services at a loss in what he called a price race to the bottom. So they chose to make image AI run faster. He put the idea this way at 15:37.

"let's focus on image models because like there's something interesting happening there as well"

In the news

He said the first business made no money in a year, while image revenue was climbing. The story behind the news is a report from note. It says fal's valuation doubled in half a year to $16 billion, after it raised $1.3 billion on Nov. 3.

Yurtseven said the team had no firm view then on where image models would go. fal sells this service. So it gains if the market grows. He said people now want to make feature films with these tools.

Watch the 5 minutes where he explains the switch.13:22