Replicate is joining Cloudflare

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.

> Of all the paths they could have taken

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!

They already did and they had Worker AI for quite a while [0]. But I think it didn't catch up and they have there very old models.

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/

Is this the platform they are offering on Openrouter?

https://openrouter.ai/provider/cloudflare

Their area of expertise is in running large scale infra, which they have innovated a lot to get. They’re acquiring a company that has expertise in an area they're not familiar with, which needs large scale compute infra. It seems like their needs are aligned in this case.

not sure but that's quite possible. I haven't used cloudflare workers ai myself because they had quite limited number of models and choices so far.

you've not been paying attention if you think this is their first foray