I think this is Cloudflare's most notable acquisition yet? From Wikipedia it looks like they've previously mainly acquired smaller cybersecurity firms like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_1_Security
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 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.
From an AI integration perspective, I am hopeful that Cloudflare may be able to improve "performance on the cheap" for replicate's models a little bit.
Replicate has had multiple ways to deploy for auto scaling and you can just keep running periodically to keep the system in a booted and warm state, but that has always seemed like it would be too expensive for a broke bootstrapper like me so I avoided it and model popularity was a big deciding factor. Also because of that and the potential for boot up, in general I avoided it for latency-sensitive things.
I guess there is a limit to what you can do. At some point someone has to spend the money to have the resources stay ready.
But with Cloudflare, theoretically the pool of potential users goes up, and it becomes more likely for someone to have already booted your model.
At the moment I am especially interested in performant and easy ways to run models like "sensefvg/InteractiveOmni-8B" or Qwen 2.5 Omni or models that are even more all in one than that like OpenAI Realtime or Gemini Live.
Now that Ernie 5 launched with (Omni) multimodality built in, I think within six months, developers are going to start to expect speech-to-speech capability from major AI lab releases or product line ups. I feel like eventually the spatial-temporal understanding of video models will be merged in too to make the models understand the world better. But speech in and speech out is closer to being a standard expectation.
Instead of running three models for STT->LLM->TTS with a bunch of tricks like eager end of turn or speculative decoding that basically mean you run the LLM twice or on two different models, and possibly getting shut down by API rate limits, the speech to speech models are a single model that both understands and generates audio as well as text such as for function calls.
This is probably an annoying comment because I am immediately trying to increase the requirements to not only being every model for cheap, but every model for cheap in in a low latency real time streaming way. I just happen to have a contract now that has shown me that multimodal like voice to voice is much more convenient but also much more expensive and fewer options.
Replicate has been so awesome though. Within like a day of me requesting InteractiveOmni, lucataco had it up. So another annoying comment, I sure hope he got paid.
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.
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.
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!
Acquisition or acquihire? I don't see a price tag, which seems to imply the latter?
How many players are there in this space? Replicate, RunPod, Modal, Northflank, FAL, ... Who are the big ones? It's pretty crowded, right?
FAL was smart. They ditched the "run any model" to focus on just image and video, and now they dominate that space. They raised a pretty substantial round recently. Though I don't think there's any moat and they'll soon face competition too.
What about these vs. the routers like "Open"Router?
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).
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.
I really like both these companies. Replicate just make it so easy to bundle a bunch of different AIs up into a prototype - but I think they have tonnes of untapped potential that Cloudflare could fulfil.
Cloudflare is one of those companies similar to palantir where the valuation just makes you scratch your head. But bringing in AI to try and fill out the AI valuation makes some sense I suppose
I wrote this comment [0] very recently and when I wrote it had in mind that Cloudflare might very well end up being a key player in a more centralized Internet that has developed far away from its original architecture.
Defense against threats is a pretty strong centralization incentive in different kinds of networks - social, biological.
I could imagine that a lot of people are investing based on similar scenarios in their minds.
I havent looked into the financials but the reasons I really like cloudflare is that its workers are free without card for 100k and even after that its ridiculously cheap and cloudflare tunnels and a lot of features are free and really appreciate it
I feel like people like to rub that one time cloudflare messed up when I mention it but it was a gambling website and I feel like cloudflare could've better communicated it but overall its got so much less drama than the other cloud providers and its genuinely being really nice imo
But imo, cloudflare is really dirt cheap for just starting out and at scale as well especially if using cf workers
I feel like cloudflare can make a bank in enterprice section but their pricing model also feels the most saner compared to the shady tactics used by google or others with our marketing and privacy
I know that the internet is getting centralized but I feel like there are some ways of de-centralizing it, (by example archiving web pages and then seeding them, helping on internet archive or something similar as well)
As an internet user, cf feels mid but sometimes as a guy who just wants to deploy shit or basic apis, I "vibe coded" a cloudflare worker api which I actively use so much for my own purposes setting up a custom redirector and everything without paying anything at all, I think I like it.
Honestly, nothing is as good or as bad as it seems except palantir's evaluation which makes me feel like 448 pe ratio or something similar drove me nuts the other day.
Cloudflare isn't solely a CDN anymore. CDN and DDOS-protection were the most logical "first" products to build based on their SDN ( Software Defined Networking).
A cloud is the next thing and there's a lot of money involved with the cloud. I see them as the only real competitor/challenger to Azure, AWS, GCE, ... because they aren't bound to regions ( less DevOps)
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.
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.
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 multi billion dollar valuation and a high level of ambition that investors are shooting for in this space.
If the amount was high, they'd be be bragging about it. Given that they aren't, it might be on the lower end of the 2023 valuation for the then 40M round.
Just speculating here; I don't have any more information. Basing this on my understanding of how this stuff works. This might actually be the opening round for a few more such acquisitions of the somewhat risky investments of a few years ago of companies that are probably not going to turn into trillion $ unicorns. There are lots of pretty well funded startups in this space converting investment capital into cloud GPU cost. I think some level of consolidation is overdue and might take away some building concern about over exposure in the market. Big banks and investors might be getting nervous.
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.
Now you can see the great plan going on...
First, positioning itself as the "gatekeeper" of AI services, then owning such a service to be able to abuse of your position...
simonw|3 months ago
I think this is Cloudflare's most notable acquisition yet? From Wikipedia it looks like they've previously mainly acquired smaller cybersecurity firms like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_1_Security
michaelbuckbee|3 months ago
ramimac|3 months ago
* BastionZero
* Kivera
* Baselime
* PartyKit
* Area 1
* Vectrix
* Zaraz
* Linc
* S2 Systems Corporation
* Neumob
* Eager
* CryptoSeal
* StopTheHacker
echelon|3 months ago
ilaksh|3 months ago
Replicate has had multiple ways to deploy for auto scaling and you can just keep running periodically to keep the system in a booted and warm state, but that has always seemed like it would be too expensive for a broke bootstrapper like me so I avoided it and model popularity was a big deciding factor. Also because of that and the potential for boot up, in general I avoided it for latency-sensitive things.
I guess there is a limit to what you can do. At some point someone has to spend the money to have the resources stay ready.
But with Cloudflare, theoretically the pool of potential users goes up, and it becomes more likely for someone to have already booted your model.
At the moment I am especially interested in performant and easy ways to run models like "sensefvg/InteractiveOmni-8B" or Qwen 2.5 Omni or models that are even more all in one than that like OpenAI Realtime or Gemini Live.
Now that Ernie 5 launched with (Omni) multimodality built in, I think within six months, developers are going to start to expect speech-to-speech capability from major AI lab releases or product line ups. I feel like eventually the spatial-temporal understanding of video models will be merged in too to make the models understand the world better. But speech in and speech out is closer to being a standard expectation.
Instead of running three models for STT->LLM->TTS with a bunch of tricks like eager end of turn or speculative decoding that basically mean you run the LLM twice or on two different models, and possibly getting shut down by API rate limits, the speech to speech models are a single model that both understands and generates audio as well as text such as for function calls.
This is probably an annoying comment because I am immediately trying to increase the requirements to not only being every model for cheap, but every model for cheap in in a low latency real time streaming way. I just happen to have a contract now that has shown me that multimodal like voice to voice is much more convenient but also much more expensive and fewer options.
Replicate has been so awesome though. Within like a day of me requesting InteractiveOmni, lucataco had it up. So another annoying comment, I sure hope he got paid.
kfarr|3 months ago
pm90|3 months ago
pzo|3 months ago
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/
greenie_beans|3 months ago
bogwog|3 months ago
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!
coleca|3 months ago
ProfessorZoom|3 months ago
rvz|3 months ago
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42833414
echelon|3 months ago
How many players are there in this space? Replicate, RunPod, Modal, Northflank, FAL, ... Who are the big ones? It's pretty crowded, right?
FAL was smart. They ditched the "run any model" to focus on just image and video, and now they dominate that space. They raised a pretty substantial round recently. Though I don't think there's any moat and they'll soon face competition too.
What about these vs. the routers like "Open"Router?
resiros|3 months ago
datadrivenangel|3 months ago
pancakemouse|3 months ago
[0] https://github.com/replicate/cog
doctorpangloss|3 months ago
jumski|3 months ago
jonplackett|3 months ago
redwood|3 months ago
svara|3 months ago
Defense against threats is a pretty strong centralization incentive in different kinds of networks - social, biological.
I could imagine that a lot of people are investing based on similar scenarios in their minds.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45946365
sabatonfan|3 months ago
I feel like people like to rub that one time cloudflare messed up when I mention it but it was a gambling website and I feel like cloudflare could've better communicated it but overall its got so much less drama than the other cloud providers and its genuinely being really nice imo
But imo, cloudflare is really dirt cheap for just starting out and at scale as well especially if using cf workers
I feel like cloudflare can make a bank in enterprice section but their pricing model also feels the most saner compared to the shady tactics used by google or others with our marketing and privacy
I know that the internet is getting centralized but I feel like there are some ways of de-centralizing it, (by example archiving web pages and then seeding them, helping on internet archive or something similar as well)
As an internet user, cf feels mid but sometimes as a guy who just wants to deploy shit or basic apis, I "vibe coded" a cloudflare worker api which I actively use so much for my own purposes setting up a custom redirector and everything without paying anything at all, I think I like it.
Honestly, nothing is as good or as bad as it seems except palantir's evaluation which makes me feel like 448 pe ratio or something similar drove me nuts the other day.
NicoJuicy|3 months ago
Cloudflare isn't solely a CDN anymore. CDN and DDOS-protection were the most logical "first" products to build based on their SDN ( Software Defined Networking).
A cloud is the next thing and there's a lot of money involved with the cloud. I see them as the only real competitor/challenger to Azure, AWS, GCE, ... because they aren't bound to regions ( less DevOps)
For example, what you might not know about Durable Objects => https://boristane.com/blog/what-are-cloudflare-durable-objec...
JackuB|3 months ago
jay-kor|3 months ago
https://www.replicated.com -> https://replicate.com
bobnamob|3 months ago
antipaul|3 months ago
NicoJuicy|3 months ago
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.
up2isomorphism|3 months ago
unknown|3 months ago
[deleted]
tasn|3 months ago
derelicta|3 months ago
ectospheno|3 months ago
tvararu|3 months ago
philipwhiuk|3 months ago
Uh huh
baggachipz|3 months ago
aryanchaurasia|3 months ago
jillesvangurp|3 months ago
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 multi billion dollar valuation and a high level of ambition that investors are shooting for in this space.
If the amount was high, they'd be be bragging about it. Given that they aren't, it might be on the lower end of the 2023 valuation for the then 40M round.
Just speculating here; I don't have any more information. Basing this on my understanding of how this stuff works. This might actually be the opening round for a few more such acquisitions of the somewhat risky investments of a few years ago of companies that are probably not going to turn into trillion $ unicorns. There are lots of pretty well funded startups in this space converting investment capital into cloud GPU cost. I think some level of consolidation is overdue and might take away some building concern about over exposure in the market. Big banks and investors might be getting nervous.
gk1|3 months ago
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.
ilaksh|3 months ago
greatgib|3 months ago
fullofdev|3 months ago
thayne|3 months ago
Every acquisition announcement says something like this. It is almost never true. In fact, the opposite often happens.
tonyhart7|3 months ago