# Benny Chen

> Benny Yufei Chen is a co-founder of Fireworks AI and a former Meta ads infrastructure lead. He helped start the company in 2022 after seeing machine learning compute demand rise, and now speaks about AI inference, open models, model customization and the evaluations needed to make them useful in production.

- **Role:** Co-founder, Fireworks AI
- **Organizations:** Fireworks AI, Meta, talkways
- **Education:** Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles
- **Known for:** Co-founded Fireworks AI in 2022., Previously led Meta ads infrastructure., Participated in building a platform that Fireworks said served more than 40 trillion tokens daily by July 2026.

## Career timeline

- **2011–2012** — Worked as lead backend engineer at talkways.
- **2014–2022** — Worked at Facebook/Meta, later becoming a principal software engineer and leading ads infrastructure.
- **2022** — Co-founded Fireworks AI with Lin Qiao and other AI infrastructure engineers.
- **2024** — Discussed Fireworks AI and MongoDB’s partnership at MongoDB.local NYC.
- **2026** — Spoke publicly about inference economics, open models, evaluation and customization as Fireworks AI expanded.

## Achievements

- Co-founded Fireworks AI in 2022.
- Previously led Meta ads infrastructure.
- Participated in building a platform that Fireworks said served more than 40 trillion tokens daily by July 2026.
- Presented on practical AI evaluations at AI Engineer World’s Fair in 2026.

## Latest updates

- **2026-09** — Fireworks AI launched the Specialized Intelligence Index; Chen discussed the importance of benchmarks based on real work.
- **2026-07** — Fireworks AI announced a $1.505 billion Series D and said its platform served more than 40 trillion tokens daily.
- **2026-05** — In an interview, Chen discussed model customization, evaluation quality and the company’s early pivot toward generative AI.

## Links

- Website: https://fireworks.ai
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benny-yufei-chen-2238575a/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/the_bunny_chen

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/benny-chen
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-09-29