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Why Replicate is joining Cloudflare
- ChrisArchitect 11mo agoRelated: Replicate is joining Cloudflare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45953702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45953702
- fodkodrasz 11mo agoI searched but could not find the "bought" or "money" or "dollar" or "stock" words in the marketing fluff piece, so it definitely does not answer the question in the title. What was the value of the transaction?
- dmoy 11mo ago> What was the value of the transaction? I think this is being intentionally kept under wraps, so nobody who can say anything knows.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- mrweasel 11mo agoThe term "joining" irritates me more than it should, because you're correct in asking "What is the value of the transaction?". My guess is that they aren't joining anything, CloudFlare bought the company and is keeping the team.
- shawabawa3 11mo ago> CloudFlare bought the company and is keeping the team. So the team is joining cloudflare...?
- michaelt 11mo agoAfter an incredible journey, I’m excited to announce a case of beer is joining my fridge.
- malfist 11mo agoI think it's more like: after an incredible journey, I'm excited to announce this hamburger is joining my stomach
- the_gipsy 11mo agoAnd the money is joining some bank accounts!
- mrweasel 11mo agoSure, but Replicate will probably cease to exist in the near future. So a more accurate title could be: Cloudflare buys out Replicate and transfers staff to internal teams.
- locknitpicker 11mo ago> So the team is joining cloudflare...? That's not a given as well. An acquisition usually involves restructuring the acquired company, sometimes in a way where the original team ceases to exist.
- LtWorf 11mo agoNo they will all get sacked next year.
- GaryBluto 11mo agoIt's a pretentious way of saying they acquired them. https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/acquisitions/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/acquisitions/
- amiga386 11mo agoLet us see if Replicate and Cog are shut down, and it becomes an Incredible Journey: https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/post/89180616013/what-is-an-incredible-journey https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/post/89180616013/wha...
- sg0pf 11mo ago> An incredible journey is: One company buying another and closing its services down. This is a purchase of the second company’s staff, rather than their product. An acquihire. > This is what is galling. A company that can afford to pay millions for some new staff but not for what those staff built. The people who used the service, and invested their belief and time in uploading photos, or forming friendships, or logging data, are left to find new virtual homes while their former hosts enjoy a nice (if possibly delayed) payday. > This repeated pattern only encourages more people to create flashy services that have no hope of being sustainable businesses in their own right, but may survive long enough, with VC funding, to attract the attention of a large company eager for new ideas and staff. The last paragraph is what gets me -- it makes sense to me found startups in hopes to be acquired (continue their work with the support of a big company), but founding with the intention to abandon your users? Yuck.
- pzo 11mo agoThe did explain a little bit: > We’ll be able to do things like run fast models on the edge, run model pipelines on instantly-booting Workers, stream model inputs and outputs with WebRTC, etc. Benefit to 3rd party developers is reducing latency and improving robustness of AI pipeline. Instead of going back and forth with https request at each stage to do inference you could make all in one request, e.g. doing realtime, pipelined STT, text translation, some backend logic, TTS and back to user mobile device.
- weird-eye-issue 11mo agoYou are seemingly answering something that they did not ask at all
- badmonster 11mo agoDoes edge inference really solve the latency issue for most use cases? How does cost compare at scale?
- viraptor 11mo agoDepends on how much the latency matters to you and the customers. Most services realistically won't gain much at all. Even the latency of normal web requests is very rarely relevant. Only the business itself and answer that question though.
- chrisweekly 11mo ago> "Even the latency of normal web requests is very rarely relevant." Hard disagree. Performance is typically the most important feature for any website. User abandonment / bounce rate follows a predictable, steep, nonlinear curve based on latency.
- viraptor 11mo agoI've changed the latency of actual services as well as core web vials many times and... no. Turns out the line is not that steep. For the range 200ms-1s, it's pretty much flat. Sure, you can start seeing issues for multi second requests, but that's terrible processing time. A change like eliminating intercontinental transfer latency - barely visible in results in ecommerce. There's this old meme of Amazon seeing a difference for every 100ms latency and I've never seen it actually reproduced in a controlled way. Even when CF tries to advertise lower latency https://www.cloudflare.com/en-au/learning/performance/more/website-performance-conversion-rates/ https://www.cloudflare.com/en-au/learning/performance/more/w... their data is companies reducing it by whole seconds. "Walmart found that for every 1 second improvement in page load time, conversions increased by 2%" - that's not steep. When there's a claim about improvements per 100ms, it's still based on averaging multi-second data like in https://auditzy.com/blog/impact-of-fast-load-times-on-user-experience https://auditzy.com/blog/impact-of-fast-load-times-on-user-e... In short - if you have something extremely interactive, I'm sure it matters for experience. For a typical website loading in under 1s, edge will barely matter. If you have data proving otherwise, I'd genuinely love to see that. For websites loading in over 1s, it's likely much easier to improve the core experience than split thing out into edge.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- tete 11mo agoHmm, an AI company joining Cloudflare, a company's whose major strength is to take their customer's websites offline, selling it as saving the internet and such. Maybe when the AI overlords take over Cloudflare will be our last bastion of defense. :D
- epse 11mo agoCloud flare taking a strong anti ai scraping stance. Then turning around and acquiring an AI hosting service also feels contradictory
- RobotToaster 11mo agoBuying an AI company when you have a monopoly on scraping most of the internet seems like good business sense.
- JimDabell 11mo agoCloudflare literally offers a paid scraping API as one of its services. https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-rendering/rest-api/scrape-endpoint/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-rendering/rest-api...
- wongarsu 11mo agoCloudflare is also big on serverless on the edge (where the edge is their cdn), including AI inference
- nottorp 11mo agoSo how long until Cloudflare joins the hated monopolies list?
- gostsamo 11mo agoI hate them a bit already, but beyond bringing down parts of the internet from time to time and occasional captchas, they are not an everyday annoyance like Google, Microsoft, and the rest.
- cess11 11mo agoTo me they are, using IPv6 and VPN means CloudFlare has trouble automatically identifying me and pesters me with image captcha loops.
- MildlySerious 11mo agoTheir entire business model is effectively centralizing the web. The downtime over the last two weeks shows some of the problem with that. I have used their products and have more favor toward them than I do for the corporations you're referring to, but ultimately my question is the same.
- philipwhiuk 11mo agoIt's maybe obvious why Replicate might want to be part of Cloudflare. It's less obvious why Cloudflare want Replicate. As for the price: > Replicate has raised $52.5M in funding from investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator and Sequoia Capital, with last known valuation of $350M [2023] It would be interesting to know how much hype there is in valuations since 2023. I assume it's mostly vesting options because I doubt Cloudflare has the cash to throw around. I would guess $500M valuation but I could be off by a lot.
- esseph 11mo ago500mil would be roughly 12.5% of a available liquid assets for cloudflare. They are a huge, huge middleman of internet traffic and many, many services.
- NicoJuicy 11mo agoCloudflare has made considerable improvements in running small models in gpu's world-wide ( loading multiple small models). I think they want to be the provider of inference for specialized slm's. Replicate is a perfect acquisition for that, they have a large catalog of smaller models. With the acquisition they are saying that they have made enough improvements for the next step, earning money from those improvements.
- tzury 11mo agoI gave Replicate a shot but needed to run on my own GPUs, so I initially used Cog to port the workload. I quickly realized Cog was an obstacle rather than an accelerator. I replaced it with a lightweight FastAPI layer, which immediately unblocked me: 1. Native I/O with Google Cloud Storage. 2. Freedom to use the latest Torch and Nvidia Docker images without abstraction overhead. 3. Running Torch and TensorFlow in parallel (legacy model constraints that Cog struggled with). It forces the question: What is Replicate's value proposition for a startup where the founders are competent engineers? If you aren't afraid of a Dockerfile, the "ease of use" premium evaporates. The answer to that question is likely this acquisition. The standalone AI middleware market is precarious; the landscape shifts too fast and technical founders will eventually outgrow the training wheels. Folding into Cloudflare gives the team a sustainable home to leverage the platform's scale, rather than competing solely on a container abstraction layer. Wish them the best. Cloudflare’s infrastructure is likely the right environment to turn this into a high-leverage product
- paprikanotfound 11mo agoMe too. After trying it out I found Cog to be super frustrating to use and the only use case for me ended-up being trying out a new model through the web UI occasionally.
- crossroadsguy 11mo agoOkay, this is the kind of post I have not read and will never read but I will still comment. Why Replicate is joining Cloudflare? Because you paid money to acquire it. Why the fuck else? Ffs.
- kwanbix 11mo agoBecause capitalism structurally favors the concentration of power and wealth.
- huijzer 11mo ago> Why Replicate is joining Cloudflare Because a lot of money was transferred from Cloudflare's bank account to the bank accounts of the stockholders of Replicate?
- Temporary_31337 11mo agocame here to put this comment exactly ;)
- petcat 11mo agoI think the article is more about why Cloudflare thought that was a valuable proposition. Why do I have a shovel? Because I transferred $48 to Home Depot's bank account.
- mlnj 11mo agoIt's more like Home Depot sold you a shovel because you had $48 to spare. they don't care about the why.
- naasking 11mo ago"Why" is about motivation, not mechanics.
- moralestapia 11mo agoAnd that's the motivation ...
- nextworddev 11mo agoBecause Replicate has no chance of beating Fal or Together?
- dang 11mo agoRecent and related: Replicate is joining Cloudflare - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45953702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45953702 - Nov 2025 (68 comments)
- Rebelgecko 10mo agoI'm surprised none of the reasons were financial