Why Replicate is joining Cloudflare

Summary

We're happy to announce that as of today Replicate is officially part of Cloudflare.When we started Replicate in 2019, OpenAI had just open sourced GPT-2, and few people outside of the machine learning community paid much attention to AI. But for those of us in the field, it felt like something big was about to happen. Remarkable models were being created in academic labs, but you needed a metaphorical lab coat to be able to run them.We made it our mission to get research models out of the lab into the hands of developers. We wanted programmers to creatively bend and twist these models into products that the researchers would never have thought of.We approached this as a tooling problem. Just like tools like Heroku made it possible to run websites without managing web servers, we wanted to build tools for running models without having to understand backpropagation or deal with CUDA errors.The first tool we built was Cog: a standard packaging format for machine learning models. Then we built Replicate as the platform to run Cog models as API endpoints in the cloud. We abstracted away both the low-level machine learning, and the complicated GPU cluster management you need to run inference at scale.It turns out the timing was just right. When Stable Diffusion was released in 2022 we had mature infrastructure that could handle the massive developer interest in running these models. A ton of fantastic apps and products were built on Replicate, apps that often ran a single model packaged in a slick UI to solve a particular use case.Since then, AI Engineering has matured into a serious craft. AI apps are no longer just about running models. The modern AI stack has model inference, but also microservices, content delivery, object storage, caching, databases, telemetry, etc. We see many of our customers building complex heterogenous stacks where the Replicate models are one part of a higher-order system across several platforms.This is why we’re joining Cloudflare. Replicate...