Why Replicate Is Joining Cloudflare — and What It Means for AI Builders

So today, December the 16th, we already published an episode about a proactive WAF react vulnerability protection. What does that mean? Also firewall for AI, how important it is, what's coming. In that episode, we also have a multiplayer chess demo in chat. Really cool. But this clip, this short clip is all about why Replicate joined Cloudflare. Replicate is a very cool company, has thousands of models, AI models for you to use. So this is a conversation with Craig Dennis, our senior developer educator about why Replicate joined Cloudflare, what can be achieved with that, what's coming. So stay tuned for this conversation. A small note, you'll also find a link here in this episode with credits for you to use the Replicate without spending money. So stay tuned for that as well. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Craig Dennis. Hello, Craig. Welcome to This Week in Ed again. Hey, thanks for having me. Awesome to be back. How you been? I'm good. I'm good. It's already evening in Lisbon. So a little bit earlier in San Francisco, right? Yeah, I'm in Portland, Portland, Oregon. But same time zone. We want you here to explain how relevant it is for Cloudflare to acquire Replicate. What does that mean for developers? Oh my gosh, Joe, we just had our, I have so many people on my team from the Replicate merger that happened. And we, they're so awesome. And I have always used Replicate. Like, had you used Replicate before the merger? Whenever new models come out, they're like, so rapidly there and available in a test. And you can like, there's a nice form, and you can just kind of put it and see what the inputs are. So you can see like, I have this idea, is this gonna work? And like, I, this is gonna sound like I'm making this up. But there's 50,000 models there. 50,000 AI models, right? So you, and that's, you know, like, just think about like, you could take some input and do something with it, and then get some output. And that is 50,000 different opportunities of that. It's wild that that exists. We were just, we just had this, they were given a really awesome demo, getting our team up to speed with, with what we could build with it, which is literally anything. But showing as we went, and one of them, there was a, give us an audio file, right? So you feed it an audio file, and it generates how to play it on the piano. It generates a video of, you know, like, that old video game where the notes would drop, and you'd have to press it at the right time. It generates a video of that from the audio file. So like, input an audio file, export music, coding, just incredible. The, what you can build and what you can experiment with. And like, in the past, so the way that this works, like, there, Replicate was really, really good at image models, right? So if I'm going to go, and I'm going to generate an image, high quality image, the latest thing, like, last week, ByteDance released, C Dream 4.5. It's awesome. I've been playing with it. I've been playing with it on Replicate, because it's there. And then the week before that, Nano Banana Pro came out, and I was able to play with both of those, and use them in Cloudflare apps. Oftentimes with that, you don't want to, they don't want to store it forever, right? Replicate in the past, put it up, and it goes away. Because oftentimes, in these apps where you're generating stuff really quickly, you're going to get it away, or you're going to save it someplace. And so obviously, we have a great object storage. But there, they cache it for about an hour. So it will go away if you don't capture it. And so we have all this developing, all these developer tools that will help you go and build whatever app that you want, whatever sort of interface and whatever sort of data storage that you need to do. And I have been having so much fun, man. We did it. I built this app. And I'll share it here. I'll share it in a bit. It's called Slide-a-Roki, right? So we were trying to introduce our teams to how we do things. And you, you put in, we said, you get seven minutes. Just imagine this. You get seven minutes to go look at any one of the Cloudflare tools. And I want you to write down six or seven points, six, seven, I did the thing that all the kids are doing. We want to get you those points that you would want somebody to know, but just go rough with it. And then I had it generate slides. So not only does it have, so I use all replicate models for this. So I use the latest Gemini Pro was out there. So, so doing the LLM stuff for that, it created all the slides and I had it come kind of based on the title. I had you do a kind of clever title and then it generated all the slides and they're incredible. The detail of what these were doing. And like I said, try to make it weird. Cause we wanted to have like the live experience. Cause you didn't know it was like Slide-a -Roki. So you didn't know what the slide was going to come up with. Absolutely gorgeous out of this world. Like some of them, one of the things that I was trying to show that how durable objects, a lot of tools are built on top of durable objects. The agents framework sits on top of durable objects. And it came up with the concept of it's turtles all the way down. And it was a photo realistic turtle that was pointing at the different things on all these different slides. And it also came up with a really clever, clever name across it. And of course, you know, it all worked. I was running it inside of an agent and all worked in the sliding thing back and forth. And we're just in a time where like you can, you can build apps now, right? You can have an idea for an app and literally build it. Like it's more than like, I'm going to write this down on a napkin. It's fast, right? So fast. Yeah. And the coding world that we're living in now where you can do that sort of stuff. Right. So super, super fun. I am so excited to see what people build with, with this, with the opportunity of having all of those models in front of you. It's like, it's, it's really awesome. It's also part of the ecosystem, right? Now we have a bigger ecosystem because of this more models available. Yeah. And the integration will be better because they will be part of call of offer. So integration there will be better. So our ecosystem for people to build for developers to build things quickly and really good will be improved with this, right? Yeah, absolutely. And I think that, you know, there's a, there's a gigantic community of, of Replicate users too, right? And a lot of them haven't, didn't know that they could build, build on our, our tools as well. So I think that there's also this really nice merger. We had a happy hour, just, I was going to say last week, but it was just a couple of days ago. We had, we had a bunch of people together and it was the Replicate community meeting the Cloudflare community and just, just hearing about what people were building together. The energy in the room was awesome. It was so cool to see what people are, are, are thinking about or where they were struggling before and how we can kind of help and, and, and do that together. I'm, I'm so excited. I'm, I'm so excited. We have such creative builders on the platform and there's so, so many creative builders building models. Now, the other thing that you can do is they do a really good job of I can, let's say that I wanted to train a model on, let's say I've got a, I've got a lizard. My girls have a, have a bearded dragon. And if I wanted to put that lizard in different places, I could train a model. I can, there's a, there's this thing called Loras and it's a really easy way to go. I can, after I give it like 10, 10 to 15 pictures, I could put that lizard anywhere I wanted him, surfing him, doing whatever, whatever you can imagine, but like specifically him. Oh, so it's a really nice like opportunity to explore in that space too, because there's a lot of things that, there's a lot of apps that are on the cusp of almost being possible, but with this power, I think that we're, we're really, I'm, I'm really excited to see where people take this. For sure. And we'll have more about this in the future with integration coming into place and things like that. But what should people, where should people start if they want to start something right now? Yeah, absolutely. Head to the replicate.com, head to replicate.com. First of all, follow us Cloudflare Devs on Twitter. We're, we're doing, you also follow replicate on Twitter. So it's at replicate. And then I want you to go to replicate.com. There's an explorer tab. They've done an excellent job of maintaining like, what can you do with this? And it is overwhelming, but just take a breath, take a breath and go through there and look and think about you are going to, I guarantee you within three to four minutes, there'll be, Oh, I was always wanted to build something like that. And you can, it's there. Maybe we could, the viewers, we could get some free credits as well. I know some people. We'll attach some credits here for people that are watching this, that want to go explore. There's a little, little way to do it where you don't need to go, go reach into your own pocket. So we'd love, we'd love to share some credits out with you. That's great. That's really great. Actually, one of the things that I, I'm surprised in the, in this time and age is, as you said, the things that you can build quickly. The other day, I was doing a presentation, usually with slides, and I just did a website, like a very cool website for the presentation. And it was so easy, so quick. And it was, you can definitely see, and you can use your images, of course, you can put like content in a very cool way. And this charts really well with just some data points. You can do so many things so quickly. That is mind blowing. It's quite something. The age, the age of personal applications is here. I think that like, we need, we need a little bit better of an interface in front of it to allow literally everybody to do it. But right now, I just feel like we're at this place where it's like, if you lean in a little bit, you can build whatever it is that you're trying to do. And I love, I love that. I love where we're at. Perfect. Actually, on this episode, we'll also have a chess multiplayer tool inside ChatGPT, a demo on that from Steve. Nice. It's quite nice, actually. That's in the ChatGPT app, right? Because they're starting to push apps out there. Yeah, that's coming. That's so cool. And all, all fully hosted and pushed through us, right? Yep. Agents SDK. Awesome. So cool. Thank you, Craig. And let's speak more when we have more also to share. Absolutely. Looking forward to it, Gael. Thanks for having me on the show. That's a wrap.