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Show HN: ML Blocks – Deploy multimodal AI workflows without code

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Show HN: ML Blocks – Deploy multimodal AI workflows without code

#1

Post by neilxm »

Hey everyone,

ML Blocks is a node-based workflow builder to create multi-modal AI workflows without writing any code.

You connect blocks that call various visual models like GPT4v, Segment Anything, Dino etc. along with basic image processing blocks like resize, invert color, blur, crop, and several others.

The idea is to make it easier to deploy multi-step image processing workflows, without needing to spin up endless custom OpenCV cloud functions to glue together AI models. Usually, even if you're using cloud inference servers like Replicate, you still need to write your own image processing code to pre and post-process images in your pipeline. When you're trying to move fast, that's just unnecessary overhead.

With ML Blocks, you can build a workflow and deploy the whole thing as a single API. AFAIK, ML Blocks is the only end-to-end workflow builder built specifically for image processing.

If you're curious, our models run on Replicate, HuggingFace & Modal Labs cloud GPUs and we use React Flow for the node UX.

Show HN: ML Blocks – Deploy multimodal AI workflows without code
mlblocks.com

Re: Show HN: ML Blocks – Deploy multimodal AI workflows without code

#2

Post by syed99 »

I had a chance to play around with the product and I really love the ease of creating a multi step workflow, to the point where I'm sure I can train my marketing team to use it. That being said, is there a way to share these workflow with others...either privately or publicly?

Re: Show HN: ML Blocks – Deploy multimodal AI workflows without code

#3

Post by starwaver »

I like the idea of node based image editing. It reminds me of when learning how to write shader code for games and GLSL was waaaay too over my head until I discovered node based shaders, and I didn't have to wrangle with coding and instead focusing experimenting with different nodes.

However soon creating a "shader that works" was no longer an issue but how to create X effect using shaders was my next blocker, and luckily there were ton of YouTube tutorials on these, which was very helpful, but this continues to be a pain point even now

Since now we are in the age of AI, would it be possible to prompt something like "create me a workflow to take image A, a concept art of a character and convert into into a walking animation sprite sheet with 16 frames for each animation walking up, down, left, right and all diagonal directions" and have it not only generate the result, but a workflow to create the result so it can be edited and tweaked.

Re: Show HN: ML Blocks – Deploy multimodal AI workflows without code

#4

Post by neilxm »

syed99 wrote: post #2

I had a chance to play around with the product and I really love the ease of creating a multi step workflow, to the point where I'm sure I can train my marketing team to use it. That being said, is there a way to share these workflow with others...either privately or publicly?

Nice! Sharing workflows is coming up in approximately 2 sprints. We're working on 2 flavors of sharing. The first is sharing the workflow directly and letting someone copy it for the dev community. The more interesting option though is the second, where we'll let you build a read-only dashboard that will just show inputs and outputs. that should be useful when you share it with a marketing team that doesn't need to mess around with the graph but would use the workflow for things like repetitive image editing tasks.

Re: Show HN: ML Blocks – Deploy multimodal AI workflows without code

#6

Post by neilxm »

starwaver wrote: post #3

I like the idea of node based image editing. It reminds me of when learning how to write shader code for games and GLSL was waaaay too over my head until I discovered node based shaders, and I didn't have to wrangle with coding and instead focusing experimenting with different nodes. However soon creating a "shader that works" was no longer an issue but how to create X effect using shaders was my next blocker, and lu…

Oh yea I know what you mean. There are several parallels here with shader nodes for sure. We've been thinking about a voyager/agent-style approach where an agent can start to learn "skills" where skills are individual blocks. Each skill represents a certain function applied to an image and based on a specific instruction set we should be able to craft a sequence of actions that will lead to that result.

One way to leverage that is building the graphs via a prompt, but another way might be to not think of the workflow as a pre-constructed graph at all. Rather perhaps we build dynamic graphs whenever you ask for a certain action - like a conversational image editing interface.

So you say something like make the woman's hair purple. We apply segmentation to the hair, and then add a puple color overlay exactly to that area.

Re: Show HN: ML Blocks – Deploy multimodal AI workflows without code

#7

Post by pj_mukh »

chaoz_ wrote: post #5

Love the idea, however, it's not clear whether I will get access to a large collection of components for building such workflows or what is currently possible? Would nice to get this info before proceeding with auth.

Theoretically, most OpenCV-type image pre/post-processing stuff is available in blocks and then all the major multi-modal + diffusion AI blocks are also available. As a sampling of what we've recently added:

AI Blocks: - Multimodal LLM (GPT4v)

- Remove objects in Images

- AI Upscale 4x

- Prompted Segmentation (SAM w/ text prompting)

Editing Blocks: - Change format

- Rotate

- Invert Color

- Blur

- Resize

- Mask to Alpha

If we've missed something please let us know, we just went through a big exercise in making sure we can quickly add new blocks.

Re: Show HN: ML Blocks – Deploy multimodal AI workflows without code

#8

Post by neilxm »

chaoz_ wrote: post #5

Love the idea, however, it's not clear whether I will get access to a large collection of components for building such workflows or what is currently possible? Would nice to get this info before proceeding with auth.

To add to pj's comment -

We are adding more blocks constantly. We're also considering allowing the community to push their own blocks using an open api schema.

Re: Show HN: ML Blocks – Deploy multimodal AI workflows without code

#9

Post by cchu »

neilxm wrote: post #4
syed99 wrote: post #2

I had a chance to play around with the product and I really love the ease of creating a multi step workflow, to the point where I'm sure I can train my marketing team to use it. That being said, is there a way to share these workflow with others...either privately or publicly?

Nice! Sharing workflows is coming up in approximately 2 sprints. We're working on 2 flavors of sharing. The first is sharing the workflow directly and letting someone copy it for the dev community. The more interesting option though is the second, where we'll let you build a read-only dashboard that will just show inputs and outputs. that should be useful when you share it with a marketing team that doesn't need to m…

This is great and totally agree with the above comment. I think it's a really useful next step up from someone who is comfortable with prompts but wants a bit more control or having a resusable workflow. It'd be cool if there can also be more premade "recipes" as a starting point to modify/extend. Then hitting the play button gives you something right away.

Also kudos to whoever made the fun little tilt animations on hover ;)

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