Episode Details

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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?

The Definitive Replicate Story (warts and all)

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.

2019: Cog

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

But they found that researchers were terrible users: they’d do all this work for a paper, publish it, and then never return to it again.

“We talked to a bunch of researchers and they really wanted that.... But how the hell is this a business, you know, like how are we even going to make any money out of this?

…So we went and talked to a bunch of companies trying to sell them something which didn't exist. So we're like, hey, do you want a way to share research inside your company so that other researchers or say like the product manager can test out the machine learning model? They're like, maybe. Do you want like a deployment platform for deploying models? Do you want a central place for versioning models? We were trying to think of lots of different products we could sell that were related to this thing…

So we then got halfway through our YC batch. We hadn't built a product. We had no users. We had no idea what our business was going to be because we couldn't get anybody to like buy something which didn't exist. And actually there was quite a way through our, I think it was like two thirds the way through our YC batch or something. And we're like, okay, well we're kind of screwed now because we don't have anything to show at demo day.”

The team graduated YCombinator with no customers, no product and nothing to demo - which was fine because demo day got canceled as the YC W’20 class graduated right into the pandemic. The team spent the next year exploring and building Covid tools.

2021: CLIP + GAN = PixRay

By 2021, OpenAI released CLIP. Overnight dozens of Discord servers got spun up to hack on CLIP + GANs. Un