We might not have made it clear in the post how to signup for the sandbox. Just head to http://release.ai and click on "Start Free Trial".
Launch HN: Release (YC W20) – Orchestrate AI Infrastructure and Applications
31–40 of 41 posts
Re: Launch HN: Release (YC W20) – Orchestrate AI Infrastructure and Applications
#32Super interesting you guys have been working on this since 2020 if I'm reading the post title correctly? Would love to know the iterations you've gone through.
It would be hard to count. Basically every customer we had on Release 1.0 was an iteration towards this. If you go to https://release.com it's there and we have many happy customers using it. There are definitely challenges with that business, however, that made us look for easier ways to get people using the platform we had built. People looking to do ephemeral environments have a lift to move their environment definitions into Release and it's a work effort that needs prioritization. Release.ai is built on the same platform and because AI frameworks are more turn key than bespoke software stacks companies have been building on, we believe Release.ai will be easier to adopt. In the long run AI applications and traditional web applications are going to merge and we think we're the platform that will do that in the long run. Long story short, hundreds of iterations.
Re: Launch HN: Release (YC W20) – Orchestrate AI Infrastructure and Applications
#33Great system, no complaints!!
Re: Launch HN: Release (YC W20) – Orchestrate AI Infrastructure and Applications
#34What has been the feedback from early users regarding the ease of transitioning from your original product focus to the current AI orchestration platform?
Re: Launch HN: Release (YC W20) – Orchestrate AI Infrastructure and Applications
#35I've noticed that while a bunch of developers have played with LLM's for toy projects, few seem to have any actual experience taking it to prod in front of real users. I’ve personally had to do so for a few startups, and it's like trying to nail Jell-O to a tree. Every random thing you change, from prompts to models, yields massively different/unpredictable results. I think because of this, a bunch of companies/tools…
I'm in the process of rolling out an LLM to a user facing feature and it's difficult. The scaling is not obvious, and the quality fluctuates even with Llama-3.1 (8B) when compared to GPT-4o. We're probably going with 4o since the JSON return works much more reliable, it follows instructions for text generation more directly, etc.
Re: Launch HN: Release (YC W20) – Orchestrate AI Infrastructure and Applications
#36This looks cool, but I'm a little confused about the pricing model. It sounds like I'm paying you for every hour my jobs are running on my own infrastructure if I'm reading it right. That seems like a really odd way to price things if true.
It's not a unique model - that's what e.g. Databricks does too. You pay for the resources, which means you can deploy them with whatever security model you require (good for enterprise, with all the firewalls and secrets and security reviews your heart desires), but you also pay for the management layer that Databricks offers. In Databricks' case you're basically doubling the infrastructure cost per hour. Data and co…
Fair enough. I'm just not familiar with that pricing model, but that somewhat makes sense.
Re: Launch HN: Release (YC W20) – Orchestrate AI Infrastructure and Applications
#37Pretty insane that these folks are YC 2020 and just now pivoted again. Shows how hard company building is.
Re: Launch HN: Release (YC W20) – Orchestrate AI Infrastructure and Applications
#38I've noticed that while a bunch of developers have played with LLM's for toy projects, few seem to have any actual experience taking it to prod in front of real users. I’ve personally had to do so for a few startups, and it's like trying to nail Jell-O to a tree. Every random thing you change, from prompts to models, yields massively different/unpredictable results. I think because of this, a bunch of companies/tools…
You're right - hitting OpenAI/Anthropic/Google directly is often the quickest way to get started, and for many simple applications, it might be all you need. However, Release.ai addresses the needs of companies that require more control, customization, and scalability in their AI systems. Release.ai isn't about replacing the big players but about giving you options. It's for when you need more than a generic API call…
define more control, define more scalability and also define more customization
Re: Launch HN: Release (YC W20) – Orchestrate AI Infrastructure and Applications
#39We might not have made it clear in the post how to signup for the sandbox. Just head to http://release.ai and click on "Start Free Trial".
Are there 2 levels of free usage, where the first sandbox doesn't require Google Cloud or AWS accounts, but after the trial, they are required?
Re: Launch HN: Release (YC W20) – Orchestrate AI Infrastructure and Applications
#40Pretty insane that these folks are YC 2020 and just now pivoted again. Shows how hard company building is.
It's not a "pivot" in the traditional sense. But yeah, building companies is probably one of the hardest things one can do. We still run https://release.com and https://release.ai is built on the same platform.