Fireworks AI

Fireworks AISince 2023-09

Fireworks AI is an enterprise AI inference and model serving platform built to run open-weights LLMs, vision models, and multimodal architectures with lightning-fast speeds and lowest cost. Created by former Meta AI and PyTorch infrastructure engineers, Fireworks powers millions of daily AI requests with sub-100ms time-to-first-token (TTFT) and high token throughput. Fireworks allows developers to seamlessly deploy, fine-tune, and serve models like Llama 3.1/3.3, DeepSeek-R1/V3, Mixtral, Qwen 2.5, and Flux.1 with zero cold starts. It uniquely supports instant LoRA fine-tuning switching on shared GPU infrastructure, allowing thousands of custom fine-tuned adapters to run without paying for dedicated hardware.

The Fireworks AI engine utilizes proprietary GPU compilation optimizations, speculative decoding, dynamic kernel fusing, and custom tensor-parallel kernels to maximize memory bandwidth and FLOPS efficiency on NVIDIA H100 and B200 clusters. Fireworks provides a fully OpenAI-compatible REST and streaming API alongside native function calling, JSON schema guarantees, and multimodal image input. Its FireAttention technology drastically cuts KV-cache memory overhead, enabling massive concurrency and context lengths up to 128k tokens while maintaining deterministic latency SLAs.

Modal LabsSince 2022-11

Modal Labs is a high-performance serverless cloud platform that enables AI engineers and developers to run Python code in the cloud with instant access to thousands of CPUs, GPUs, and persistent network volumes. Founded by former Spotify CTO Erik Bernhardsson, Modal reimagines cloud computing with sub-second cold starts and zero infrastructure configuration. With Modal, you define your container image, dependencies, and GPU hardware directly inside standard Python code using simple decorators (e.g. `@app.function(gpu="H100")`). Modal handles container building, volume mounting, GPU scheduling, and automatic scaling down to zero in milliseconds, making it the premier choice for running generative AI models, ComfyUI video pipelines, and massive parallel batch jobs.

Modal operates a custom container runtime built in Rust that bypasses standard Docker daemon overhead, allowing container images to spawn in under 900 milliseconds. Its distributed filesystem mounts shared NetworkFileSystem (NFS) volumes across thousands of simultaneous workers with near-local NVMe read speeds. Modal supports NVIDIA T4, L4, A10G, A100 (40GB/80GB), and H100 SXM5 GPUs. Developers can attach web endpoints (`@app.web_endpoint`), schedule recurring cron tasks, execute distributed map-reduce jobs across tens of thousands of cores, and monitor live streaming logs via the interactive web console.