a16z|Sep 17, 2026 18:39
.@fal's Gorkem Yurtseven and Batuhan Taskaya on making an open source video model 35x faster, and what Hollywood wanted after they built it:
Last month, MiniMax released H3, an open source video model. fal rebuilt it - they cut down the steps the model takes to make a video, rewrote the code under each stage, and got the GPUs to 70-80% of their theoretical ceiling instead of their usual 30-40%. No quality loss.
Video now generates faster than you can film it. The models have gotten so cheap and fast that end users aren't even asking for improvements in either category anymore. The gap has moved to quality, or how closely the model follows the prompt.
Hollywood wasn't a customer a year ago and is now fal's fastest growing segment. Studios love it for the little things - extending a shot, moving the camera, changing the lighting. Those edits land 80-90% of the time. fal is chasing 99.9%.
In this conversation with a16z's Jennifer Li:
00:00 Intro
01:45 The first open model worth rebuilding
03:45 The industry ran out of compute in April
06:25 35x faster without losing quality
11:05 5s of video generated in 1.5s
14:25 The weekend fal dropped everything
16:15 3 viral projects nobody planned
18:20 Teaching a video model to remember
20:25 An hour of video that's consistent
23:30 2x the usage of other models in 3 weeks
26:35 The case for giving video away for free
29:00 Blender sketch in, finished shot out
30:40 Chasing 99.9% reliability
34:15 Hollywood, fal's fastest-growing customer
36:50 Why studios wouldn't touch it until now
YouTube: https://youtu.be/SDbRJXQrYGY
@gorkem @isidentical @fal @JenniferHli
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