They think they've got a leg up on their model partners. That the foundation model companies will mostly become generic copies of one another, servants of the compute layer. There are so many foundation video models now, and they'll battle it out over dwindling margins. Pika, Runway, Kling - they're all the same. And there's also growing open source foundation models.
The thing that stands in Fal's way is that the future of AI video for artists is local. Hunyuan and Comfy can run on desktop machines, and real artists hate the SaaS model and non local stuff. It doesn't look like we'll even need A100s to reach Pixar levels of quality.
The ones to watch in the art space are Comfy and Invoke. And Adobe.
Fal probably has a future in powering the API-driven YouTube Shorts slop, though there's probably an upper limit to the number of talking head startups.
But there's no way they win artists over to cloud. Sophisticated tools are going to be local. Any SaaS art tools that do achieve escape velocity will buy and manage their own compute and won't go through Fal as a reseller.