I gave Replicate a shot but needed to run on my own GPUs, so I initially used Cog to port the workload.
I quickly realized Cog was an obstacle rather than an accelerator. I replaced it with a lightweight FastAPI layer, which immediately unblocked me:
It forces the question: What is Replicate's value proposition for a startup where the founders are competent engineers? If you aren't afraid of a Dockerfile, the "ease of use" premium evaporates.1. Native I/O with Google Cloud Storage. 2. Freedom to use the latest Torch and Nvidia Docker images without abstraction overhead. 3. Running Torch and TensorFlow in parallel (legacy model constraints that Cog struggled with).The answer to that question is likely this acquisition.
The standalone AI middleware market is precarious; the landscape shifts too fast and technical founders will eventually outgrow the training wheels.
Folding into Cloudflare gives the team a sustainable home to leverage the platform's scale, rather than competing solely on a container abstraction layer.
Wish them the best. Cloudflare’s infrastructure is likely the right environment to turn this into a high-leverage product
Me too. After trying it out I found Cog to be super frustrating to use and the only use case for me ended-up being trying out a new model through the web UI occasionally.
I searched but could not find the "bought" or "money" or "dollar" or "stock" words in the marketing fluff piece, so it definitely does not answer the question in the title.
What was the value of the transaction?
The term "joining" irritates me more than it should, because you're correct in asking "What is the value of the transaction?". My guess is that they aren't joining anything, CloudFlare bought the company and is keeping the team.
> CloudFlare bought the company and is keeping the team.
So the team is joining cloudflare...?
After an incredible journey, I’m excited to announce a case of beer is joining my fridge.
It's a pretentious way of saying they acquired them. https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/acquisitions/
> What was the value of the transaction?
I think this is being intentionally kept under wraps, so nobody who can say anything knows.
The did explain a little bit:
> We’ll be able to do things like run fast models on the edge, run model pipelines on instantly-booting Workers, stream model inputs and outputs with WebRTC, etc.
Benefit to 3rd party developers is reducing latency and improving robustness of AI pipeline. Instead of going back and forth with https request at each stage to do inference you could make all in one request, e.g. doing realtime, pipelined STT, text translation, some backend logic, TTS and back to user mobile device.
You are seemingly answering something that they did not ask at all
Does edge inference really solve the latency issue for most use cases? How does cost compare at scale?
Depends on how much the latency matters to you and the customers. Most services realistically won't gain much at all. Even the latency of normal web requests is very rarely relevant. Only the business itself and answer that question though.
It's maybe obvious why Replicate might want to be part of Cloudflare.
It's less obvious why Cloudflare want Replicate.
As for the price:
> Replicate has raised $52.5M in funding from investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator and Sequoia Capital, with last known valuation of $350M [2023]
It would be interesting to know how much hype there is in valuations since 2023. I assume it's mostly vesting options because I doubt Cloudflare has the cash to throw around. I would guess $500M valuation but I could be off by a lot.
Cloudflare has made considerable improvements in running small models in gpu's world-wide ( loading multiple small models).
I think they want to be the provider of inference for specialized slm's. Replicate is a perfect acquisition for that, they have a large catalog of smaller models.
With the acquisition they are saying that they have made enough improvements for the next step, earning money from those improvements.
500mil would be roughly 12.5% of a available liquid assets for cloudflare.
They are a huge, huge middleman of internet traffic and many, many services.
Hmm, an AI company joining Cloudflare, a company's whose major strength is to take their customer's websites offline, selling it as saving the internet and such.
Maybe when the AI overlords take over Cloudflare will be our last bastion of defense. :D
Cloud flare taking a strong anti ai scraping stance. Then turning around and acquiring an AI hosting service also feels contradictory
Buying an AI company when you have a monopoly on scraping most of the internet seems like good business sense.
Cloudflare literally offers a paid scraping API as one of its services.
https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-rendering/rest-api...
So how long until Cloudflare joins the hated monopolies list?
Their entire business model is effectively centralizing the web. The downtime over the last two weeks shows some of the problem with that.
I have used their products and have more favor toward them than I do for the corporations you're referring to, but ultimately my question is the same.
My guess, just a time question. Is Cloudflare publicly traded?
They are, on the NYSE: $NET
Tech is full of ironies. 5 years ago cloudflare was held as the savior of internet. People in HN and tech in general put them on pedestal. 1.1.1.1, generous ddos protection, cdn, adn to name a few.
Fastforward to today, they being hated foe bringing down the internet, compared to failing giants.
I think it is a reminder that evil and good recides within oneself.
> I think it is a reminder that evil and good recides within oneself.
It's more like "organizations that attain monopoly position find themselves in a bubble that becomes disconnected from reality, regardless of the quality of their intentions".
Most recent example is Google. Cloudflare next, probably.
I thought they were already on that list.
I hate them a bit already, but beyond bringing down parts of the internet from time to time and occasional captchas, they are not an everyday annoyance like Google, Microsoft, and the rest.
To me they are, using IPv6 and VPN means CloudFlare has trouble automatically identifying me and pesters me with image captcha loops.
Funny, I use them to provide ipv6 to ipv4-only endpoints.
He's talking about tunnelbroker from HE being treated as malicious traffic by Cloudflare
Of course, soon only cloudflare traffic will be legit because you know, everyone uses it.