Painting the Town AI
In August 2022, Ben Firshman woke with a splitting headache. He stumbled through his San Francisco apartment wracked by achiness and chills and grabbed a COVID test. That’s when he noticed something strange on his computer screen. It was a massive spike in traffic to the site he and fellow software engineer Andreas Jansson had launched in 2021, called Replicate.
Replicate is a platform that hosts open-source machine learning models that anyone can run in the cloud with a single line of code. While the company had a small subset of dedicated users since its founding, it had struggled to gain meaningful traction—until now.
Sitting at his computer, waiting for the results of his COVID test, Firshman studied the uptick in visitors. Stable Diffusion, the most advanced text-to-image model to date, had just been released. Thousands of developers wanted to use it, but most were not AI experts able to navigate the complexity and cost of running the model on their own. And so they were turning to Replicate, which had packaged, optimized and deployed Stable Diffusion, making the model available for anyone—AI expert or not—to use.
Terrified that the onslaught of API calls would crash the site, Firshman phoned Jansson. They agreed they needed to work fast to ensure Replicate could handle the surge of developers coming to the platform to build and collaborate on AI-based tools and products. This was why Firshman and Jansson had started Replicate in the first place: to make machine learning accessible to software engineers.
