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Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

#171

Post by threatofrain »

shados wrote: post #135
yomismoaqui wrote: post #16

Everytime I read about new things from Cloudflare they look really cool but I cannot shake the feeling of not wanting to use them for fear of lock-in, am I too paranoid?

Cloudflare is hit or miss there. They move pretty quick so they tend to ship a lot of product very quickly that have a lot of potentials. But they are very much MVPs, and you'll hit a lot of limitations that aren't always obvious at first blush. And then it can take years before they mature, at which point they'll pour a ton of resources and they'll go from useless to top tier in like 2 months. It's really hard to te…

Same! What I tell people is that Cloudflare products can be extra beta, and you have use your nose to smell the future. Truly love hate as their ecosystem of interesting tools can be so tempting.

Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

#172

Post by pjmlp »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #60
pjmlp wrote: post #30

Ah look, yet another one jumping into AI party.

This is the middle of Cloudflare's "Agents Week"... and I believe they had an Agents Week last year. We're like... at least a year or two into Cloudflare being in the AI party. ;)

Well, one needs to keep surviving the hype wave, not that other surfers overtake it.

Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

#173

Post by arandomhuman »

radlad wrote: post #38
thehamkercat wrote: post #2

Why are companies slapping "OS" in their product naming? it's stupid

I think because the idea of an "agent operating system" is starting to feel more and more inevitable. Since I can use AI to: - Pull information from external sources - Transform and/or augment that information - Publish information I almost do not need a traditional OS anymore. This obviously isn't entirely true: I still use it to interact directly with humans, and it's the way I access my LLM. For now.

You need a "traditional" operating system to even run your LLM, or do you have your own custom collection of drivers you flash your machine with? :p

Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

#174

Post by scottydelta »

Well everyone is trying to create an environment where they can safely delegate tasks to agents.

I am no different, but my approach is a dedicated powerful computer on your desk rather than something in the cloud. I am calling it Tarvis AI (derived from TARS from Interstellar and Jarvis from Iron Man), more details here: https://tarvisai.com

I have tried many of the VM/cloud-based agent setups, and they either tend to be only novelties since you can’t do much with 2-4 vCPUs + limited RAM or they start racking up expensive cloud bills.

I realized that the underlying operating systems for AI have to be built from the ground up for agents instead of taking current OSes and taming them for agents. Not sure how much of that philosophy is followed by Cloudflare. Excited to see growth in this area.

Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

#175

Post by bezko »

iamniels wrote: post #8

This is close to what I need for my company. Currently I'm test driving Open WebUI. https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui

Stay away, I had bad experience myself, I'm sure there is something better out there. For me I ended up asking Claude to build a custom RAG pipeline, took an afternoon and is 10x faster.

Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

#178

Post by kentonv »

echelon wrote: post #160
kentonv wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but Workers is the technology that makes this all possible. I don't think I could have built this without Workers as a foundation. (I tried once, with Sandstorm, and like I said, it didn't work well.) Sometimes you just can't advance the state of the art while also maintaining broad compatibility. It's all open source, though. You can run the whole stack on your own machine.

Workers is a product and you're paid to develop and sell it as an employee. I 100% understand the hustle. I do the same thing. I just don't trust a giant like Cloudflare that has done several things to weaken the open web and establish a position that is all too powerful. I don't want to give them an iota of support. Even using open source buys into their mindshare, distribution, ecosystem, and eventual supremacy and…

I tried it as a startup once, so I know what that's like. It's a lot of time spent running around begging for money (from investors and from customers) rather than building technology.

Workers is my startup-within-Cloudflare. It won't make me a billionaire, but it has still made me more money than I actually know what to do with, while being able to delegate all the stuff I don't like doing to other parts of the company that already do it quite well.

I have a lot of influence here. The CEO and CTO listen to me. E.g. I made my argument this all needed to be open source and self hostable, and they agreed enthusiastically.

I don't think I could build this better as a separate company.

Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

#179

Post by echelon »

kentonv wrote: post #178
echelon wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Workers is a product and you're paid to develop and sell it as an employee. I 100% understand the hustle. I do the same thing. I just don't trust a giant like Cloudflare that has done several things to weaken the open web and establish a position that is all too powerful. I don't want to give them an iota of support. Even using open source buys into their mindshare, distribution, ecosystem, and eventual supremacy and…

I tried it as a startup once, so I know what that's like. It's a lot of time spent running around begging for money (from investors and from customers) rather than building technology. Workers is my startup-within-Cloudflare. It won't make me a billionaire, but it has still made me more money than I actually know what to do with, while being able to delegate all the stuff I don't like doing to other parts of the comp…

I appreciate your extremely thoughtful answers. It greatly improves my perception and attitude about this.

I'll check it out.

I'm still anxious about the Cloudflare angle (and that's hard to shake), but beggars can't be choosers. You've legitimately built something cool and done a fantastic job spearheading that.

Thank you for the kind and well stated response. Sounds like you've had a lot of fun building this too.

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