In this episode of The Infra Pod, hosts Tim Chen (Essence VC) and Ian Livingstone (Keycard) sit down with Benny Chen, co-founder of Fireworks AI, to explore the evolving world of AI inference infrastructure.Benny shares his journey from Meta — where capacity planning meetings made it clear GPUs were heading "up and to the right" — to co-founding Fireworks AI before ChatGPT even launched. The conversation dives deep into why the team bet early on inference over training, how they approached model optimization from horizontal compiler techniques to per-model kernel tuning, and why model customization is the key to unlocking better-than-frontier performance for vertical use cases.Benny discusses the reality of open source vs. closed models, the rise of agentic workloads, and why the real question isn't which model to use — it's which tasks have already been saturated. This episode is packed with technical insights on inference infrastructure, reinforcement learning for model customization, and what it means to truly adopt an AI-native engineering culture.