Jeffrey Li, Liquid AI | CoreWeave Fully Connected 2026
In this interview from Fully Connected 2026, Jeffrey Li, chief operating officer of Liquid AI Inc, joins theCUBE's John Furrier and Dave Vellante to discuss how Liquid AI is redesigning foundation models from the ground up to bring production-quality intelligence to edge devices. Li explains why traditional transformer architectures, with their exploding KV caches, cannot fit within the fixed compute of phones, cars and wearables, prompting Liquid to build non-transformer models suited to constrained environments. He details Liquid Context, a new layer developed with Qualcomm that captures personal, physical-world signals only a device can see and feeds them to agents so they can act more proactively on a user's behalf.
The conversation also explores how Liquid AI partners with CoreWeave to train its specialized, alternative-architecture models, even though the resulting systems run far outside the data center. Li discusses the company's portfolio approach, spanning nearly a 1,000x range in model sizes to match everything from phones to beefier edge infrastructure such as telecom central offices. He breaks down how edge deployment simplifies data governance by keeping information on-device, and how Liquid balances latency, cost and privacy to decide what runs locally versus in the cloud. Li also points to Liquid's production deployment with Mercedes-Benz and a newly released vision model as proof points of its edge-first strategy. From quality gaps to integration hurdles, he outlines what's still holding industries like telecom back from full-scale edge AI adoption, and how Liquid is working to close that gap.
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00:00 - Unveiling Liquid AI: Infrastructure, Vision, and Edge Innovations
02:09 - Challenges of Harnessing AI on Devices
04:50 - Optimizing and Evaluating Non-Transformer Models
06:56 - Navigating Edge and Cloud: Integration and Decision-Making
08:59 - Navigating CoreWeave: Innovations, Future Directions, and Edge Deployment
12:39 - Advancing Through Collaboration and Integration
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