Core Insights - Liquid AI has formed a partnership with Shopify to license and deploy its Liquid Foundation Models (LFMs) for quality-sensitive workflows on Shopify's platform, focusing on enhancing search capabilities with a sub-20ms text model [1][3] - The partnership includes the co-development of a generative recommender system utilizing a novel HSTU architecture, which has shown improved conversion rates in testing compared to previous models [2] Group 1: Partnership Details - The partnership formalizes ongoing co-development efforts and follows Shopify's investment of $250 million in Liquid AI's Series A funding round in December 2024 [1] - The collaboration encompasses a multi-purpose license for LFMs across low-latency, quality-sensitive workloads, ongoing R&D collaboration, and a shared roadmap for future developments [4] Group 2: Model Performance - Liquid's LFMs are designed for sub-20 millisecond, multimodal, quality-preserving inference, outperforming popular open-source models like Qwen3, Gemma3, and Llama 3 with approximately 50% fewer parameters while achieving 2-10 times faster inference [3][4] - The models are tailored for applications in e-commerce, including personalized ranking, retrieval-augmented generation, and session-aware recommendations, ensuring production robustness and low-variance tail latency [4] Group 3: Executive Insights - Liquid AI's CEO emphasized the importance of reliable, efficient, and fast models for decision-making in various sectors, highlighting the partnership with Shopify as a validation of their technology at scale [3] - Shopify's CTO noted the unique capability of Liquid's models to deliver sub-20ms inference on real workloads, which is crucial for powering interactive commerce [4]