Replicate wants to take the pain out of running and hosting ML models

News Summary

  • We’re making it possible for software engineers to use machine learning with zero experience, with just a few lines of code, so they can build products with AI and apply it to business problems.”Replicate hosts thousands of ready-to-use models, including text-to-image and image-to-text models (à la Stable Diffusion).
  • The platform offers diffusion models including Stable Diffusion, models for creating and editing videos, upscaling models for images and various image-to-text and text-to-image models.Swift, painless deployment is the focus.
  • The platform can automatically generate an API server for custom machine learning models, deployed on a large cluster of GPUs.“If you get a ton of traffic, we scale up to handle the demand.
  • Typically, you’d have to battle with servers, Kubernetes, GPUs, API servers, auto-scaling and more.”Core to Replicate is Cog, an open source tool that lets developers package machine learning models in a standard, production-ready container format.
  • Firshman and Jansson developed Cog, which runs on any newer macOS, Linux or Windows 11 machine.“AI is currently too hard to use for software engineers and you have to be a machine learning engineer to use it,” Firshman said.
  • Google, Amazon and Microsoft could be considered rivals, as well — offering their own solutions for developing, launching and maintaining machine leaning models in the cloud.
Replicate, a startup that runs machine learning models in the cloud, today launched out of stealth with $17.8 million in venture capital backing; $12.5 million of the total came from a Series A led b [+4800 chars]