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Replicate is joining Cloudflare

replicate.com

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Re: Replicate is joining Cloudflare

#51

Post by pzo »

aitchnyu wrote: post #48
pzo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? https://openrouter.ai/provider/cloudflare

not sure but that's quite possible. I haven't used cloudflare workers ai myself because they had quite limited number of models and choices so far.

Re: Replicate is joining Cloudflare

#52

Post by kfarr »

As a Replicate customer, I’m excited about this news. Cloudflare has the strategic incentive to invest in this line of business and it puts Replicate in the hands of a very good product marketing and sales team to get the volume it needs for sustainability.

Re: Replicate is joining Cloudflare

#53

Post by flashblaze »

ectospheno wrote: post #49
derelicta wrote: post #22

I 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.

Who are the other ones? I'm aware of fal apart from Replicate

Re: Replicate is joining Cloudflare

#54

Post by dagi3d »

mritchie712 wrote: post #29
echelon wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know that this was an acquisition in the sense that the Replicate investors and team made bank. I don't see a price tag, and the market for these "run model" infra companies is pretty crowded.

replicate "only" raised $50m, so I'd wager the founders, investors and early employees did well here. If they raised $500m... then yes, the wouldn't have done so well.

for investors, it will highly depend on the valuation ($350m) and liquidation preferences. so, even if they "only" raised $50m, seeing almost or none return is plausible. this also includes employees who exercised their options. another story is for the founders

Re: Replicate is joining Cloudflare

#55

Post by thundergolfer »

gk1 wrote: post #19
aryanchaurasia wrote: post #6

why sell if they were doing good?

You don’t know how good they were really doing and you don’t know how good the offer was. From what I know they were the most used inference provider by developers a few years ago, but since the Together AI and Fireworks only grew while Replicate seems to have stayed quiet. It’s a highly competitive low-margin business, so volume is critical and if you’re losing volume then you’re doomed.

My perception (engineer at modal.com) is that Replicate lost out to Fal.ai more than they lost to Together AI and Fireworks.

Re: Replicate is joining Cloudflare

#59

Post by greenie_beans »

pm90 wrote: post #35

I 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.

you've not been paying attention if you think this is their first foray

Re: Replicate is joining Cloudflare

#60

Post by NicoJuicy »

antipaul wrote: post #56

Are there indicators in Cloudflare's culture or history to suggest that Replicate's strengths (docs, api, design) will remain in the long-term?

I don't think that much will change regarding to Replicate's API because of Cloudflare. It's specifically mentioned in Replicate's blog post and it's also not in their best interest.

What's important to know ( I think). Recently, Cloudflare released a blog post of Omni for AI inference. I think they performance tuned it better than other providers. So their costs per inference drops down a lot ( https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-cloudflare-runs-more-ai-mode... ). Since the performance is OK, they now want to expand usage and their model catalog.

Replicate is a perfect fit. Model catalog, infrastructure for larger models, more specialised tools for fine-tuning, ...

Eg. For inference, Replicate is basically just a Worker AI endpoint and easy to maintain. Fine-tuning could probably be something similar.

But then again, that's my 2 cents. It was already mentioned that Replicate will stay as a distinct brand.

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