This Friday we’re doing a special crossover event in SF with Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis ( previous guest!), and we will do a live podcast on site.

One standard to deploy them all - with Ben Firshman of Replicate

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2024-02-28 18:30:03

This Friday we’re doing a special crossover event in SF with Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis ( previous guest!), and we will do a live podcast on site. RSVP here.

Replicate is one of the most popular AI inference providers, reporting over 2 million users as of their $40m Series B with a16z. But how did they get there?

Their overnight success took 5 years of building, and it all started with arXiv Vanity, which was a 2017 vacation project that scrapes arXiv PDFs and re-renders them into semantic web pages that reflow nicely with better typography and whitespace.

From there, Ben and Andreas’ idea was to build tools to make ML research more robust and reproducible by making it easy to share code artefacts alongside papers. They had previously created Fig, which made it easy to spin up dev environments; it was eventually acquired by Docker and turned into ` docker-compose`, the industry standard way to define services from containerized applications.

The first iteration of Replicate was a Fig-equivalent for ML workloads which they called Keepsake (eventually Cog); it made it easy for researchers to package all their work and share it with peers for review and reproducibility.