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Back to Inside fal’s $1.65B Series E & F Led by Sequoia & Bessemer, with Burkay Gür & Gorkem Yurtseven.

Why Did Fal's Image Business Come Back?

fal co-founders Burkay Gür and Gorkem Yurtseven say about half of fal's revenue now comes from video models and half from image models. The move from images to video was fast. Video revenue started at zero and reached about 70 percent, and video looked ready to take over completely. Image models looked finished, and everything ahead looked like video.

Image editing models brought image work back. Edited frames also help video models, which interpolate between frames more effectively. Image revenue that looked like it was dying made a comeback, and the split settled at half and half.

Video is still early. The best model makes about 10 to 12 seconds, and newer ones may reach about 30 seconds. Until real-time streaming in very high definition is possible, usage keeps rising. Longer clips and higher resolution make the cost rise exponentially, because inference needs more attention and resolution multiplies the pixels. The output is still rudimentary, so there is more money to be made.

Transcript

Inside fal’s $1.65B Series E & F Led by Sequoia & Bessemer ·

Sourcery

More from this episode

  1. Why Is Generative Media One of Only Three Product-market Fits in AI?fal co-founders Burkay Gür and Gorkem Yurtseven say AI has three product-market fits: search, coding agents, and generative media.
  2. Who Pays $5 for a Five-second AI Video?fal co-founders Burkay Gür and Gorkem Yurtseven say a five-second video priced at five dollars still found essentially infinite demand.
  3. How Did Fal Move From Data Infrastructure to Image Models?fal co-founders Burkay Gür and Gorkem Yurtseven say fal started in 2021 as a compute company, before the current AI wave.
  4. Why Did Coinbase Make Candidates Pass a Crypto Quiz?Burkay Gür says Coinbase made candidates pass a crypto quiz posted on Reddit before anyone on the team would take a phone call.
  5. Why Does Fal Have No Pure Managers?fal co-founders Burkay Gür and Gorkem Yurtseven say fal has no pure managers and does not plan to add them.
  6. Why Does Fal Send Engineers Home on Weekends?fal co-founders Burkay Gür and Gorkem Yurtseven say fal looks for agency, hunger, and humility in engineers.
  7. Why Can't a New AI Model Buy Its Own Inference Compute?fal co-founders Burkay Gür and Gorkem Yurtseven say a lab with a new model has to plan inference compute before the launch.
  8. How Did Fal Get Its Name?fal co-founders Burkay Gür and Gorkem Yurtseven say fal is the initials of features and labels, two old machine-learning terms from before the current AI wave.
  9. Has AI Taken Hollywood Jobs Yet?fal co-founders Burkay Gür and Gorkem Yurtseven say AI has had zero impact on Hollywood labor so far.

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