Falcon says that the goal of Lightning AI is to make AI dev “as intuitive as using the iPhone.” The platform has enabled researchers at his alma mater, Columbia, finish hundreds of experiments in 12 hours.

“Most people don’t know this, but many of the world’s leading AI products have been trained or built on Lightning,” Falcon said. “For example, Nvidia’s suite of models, NeMo, was built using Lightning tools — Stable Diffusion by Stability AI is another.”