Meta strategy chief Dave Wehner becomes CFO of AI firm Fireworks

Dave Wehner, chief strategy officer at Meta, said on X on Friday that Wehner will go from Meta to Fireworks as the chief financial officer. Fireworks is a four-year-old firm. It lets developers customize and operate open AI models for their businesses. A July funding gave it a value of $17.5 billion. Wehner was the CFO of Meta from 2014 to 2022.

How it works

Fireworks is a platform for inference (use of a model to make answers) and model training. Its CEO, Lin Qiao, said Wehner must scale the finances and operations. Qiao wrote that Wehner wanted to go back to a company that is less large.

The numbers

3 investors led the funding in July. Nvidia also backs Fireworks. Business Insider reported talks at a first step to get more money at a value of $30 billion to $40 billion.

What is not known

In October, Fireworks said that one more party without permission got access to environment variables used in tests in a small number of customer accounts. It found no sign of access to customer models, datasets or inference traffic. No company gave a start date for Wehner.

Insight: Open models make a market for the firms that operate them

In October, Meta released Muse Spark Open, a model with open weights. It also warned that new money of hundreds of billions of dollars can be necessary. Then its strategy chief goes to Fireworks, which operates open models. This reads as money and talent that go to the firms that operate open models, not only to the firms that make them. Look for new money for Fireworks next.