I wonder if they'll continue to support and develop Cog [0], which I've found quite useful for local deployments of models (as well as to Replicate's servers).
Replicate is joining Cloudflare
41–50 of 70 posts
Re: Replicate is joining Cloudflare
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a question of crazy or not, it's just an extreme end of the multiple spectrum.. and the company is not in a positive operating margin position. So you're right they have a strong track record and there's optimism they turn a profit, but it's highly speculative. Nothing wrong with that. Just makes sense they are fleshing out their AI story while they're in a position to invest with equity IMO
Their not investing with equity. Cloudflare is cash flow positive and re-investing.
Well I'd assume the acquisition is with equity and that much of their employee compensation comes from equity, neither of which show up in a free cash flow view. Still you do make a good point. I'd have expected bigger capital costs that even if amortized would show up on cash flow some of the time.. but they appear to run a very tight capex ship. So more security SaaS than cloud provider IMO
Re: Replicate is joining Cloudflare
#43I wonder if they'll continue to support and develop Cog [0], which I've found quite useful for local deployments of models (as well as to Replicate's servers). [0] https://github.com/replicate/cog
The one time I’ve interacted with cog, predictably, it delivered none of its benefits compared to a vanilla pyproject.toml, and all of the downsides of being, ironically, not replicable.
Re: Replicate is joining Cloudflare
#44> all that’ll happen is that it’s going to get way better Every acquisition announcement says something like this. It is almost never true. In fact, the opposite often happens.
its better for founder because they can have their exit payout
Re: Replicate is joining Cloudflare
#45Replicate is my preferred go to for image models and easy proof of concepts for language models, so congratulations to them!
Re: Replicate is joining Cloudflare
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
This feels the most like Cloudflare branching out to something closer to a traditional hosting model and further from their networking efforts (though things like workers and R2 certainly have blurred that line).
I'd love to work on Cloudflare's underlying email platform... from pretty early on, I've felt like the workers model could be great for handling relatively short lived tcp connections, not just web requests... in this way, all the other facilities CF offers such as R2 and D1 could be used with an email platform that could scale incredibly well. With this acquisition, it's another natural fit into such a platform for…
If you (or others here) are truly interested in email+tcp proxying+workers-like-computing, then I have work to offer you in the build out of my company’s network/computing platform.
This is something that you can or could already do with Envoy proxy with the right amount of polish, knowhow, and elbow grease (which we have).
What Cloudflare doesn’t have are good general computing products and multitenancy supprt. But we have those, something like D1, and something like a remote tunnel that runs in your browser. So users can launch Stalwart instances painlessly and use our secret magic to render it in actual browsers without special middleware or extra state (or we could offer shared/default Stalwart to do it completely out of the box). So that would take you the rest of the way from platform-level email to application-level and user-level/managed email.
What we don’t have is the time to spare in productizing that and handling the email-specific routing in envoy, or finding capable/knowledgeable people who know all the email-specific content and skills. So hit me up if that's you, and otherwise, feel free to run wild with the knowledge that you can configure Envoy Proxy with an L4 network filter or HTTP filter that delegates to dynamically loadable/configurable wasm if you want a hackable Cloudflare workers or even a platform-level alternative (hint: store wasm code in FUSE). The L4 filter should work for email filtering.
[0] https://www.envoyproxy.io/docs/envoy/latest/intro/arch_overv...
[1] https://github.com/proxy-wasm/spec/tree/main/abi-versions/v0... (where you'd start implementing email filtering logic)
[2] https://mail.mplode.dev (demo/test Stalwart instance we're running in our dev environment. Platform magic would allow us to render an email client directly embedded in https://brilliant.mplode.dev via remote IMAP/POP3)
Re: Replicate is joining Cloudflare
#47why sell if they were doing good?
Probably because their last funding round was in 2023 and they may have been looking for another round because their revenue and cost were probably not really adding up to the valuation needed for another round. Running GPU hardware at scale is just expensive Given the price was not announced, it seems investors decided to exit via acquisition instead of trying to raise a multi hundred million round consistent with a…
thanks; excellent analysis and makes much more sense to me now!
Re: Replicate is joining Cloudflare
#48I was wondering if/when cloudflare would jump into doing “more AI”. Of all the paths they could have taken, this seems like a reasonable one. Hope that the dev team made some money/cloudflare stock from this transaction.
They already did and they had Worker AI for quite a while [0]. But I think it didn't catch up and they have there very old models. Overall I think it's a good acquisition for both of them. Replicate would have to have more competitive pricing to compete with fal.ai [0] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers-ai/models/
Is this the platform they are offering on Openrouter?
Re: Replicate is joining Cloudflare
#49I love witnessing companies getting acquired to form monopolies.
Replicate was far from a monopoly and cloudflare was arguably worse off in this space. Together they still aren’t anywhere near monopoly status for running models.
Re: Replicate is joining Cloudflare
#50I was wondering if/when cloudflare would jump into doing “more AI”. Of all the paths they could have taken, this seems like a reasonable one. Hope that the dev team made some money/cloudflare stock from this transaction.
> Of all the paths they could have taken They can't innovate themselves, and rather than try to fix the reasons why (change in leadership, corporate structure, etc), they just buy a competitor, which they will most likely run into the ground. Perfectly reasonable!
Their area of expertise is in running large scale infra, which they have innovated a lot to get. They’re acquiring a company that has expertise in an area they're not familiar with, which needs large scale compute infra. It seems like their needs are aligned in this case.