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

So today, December the 16th, we already published an episode about proactive W react vulnerability protection. What does that mean? Also, firewall for AI, how important it is, what's coming. Uh in that episode we also have a multiplayer chess demo in chatd re really cool but this clip this short clip is all about why replicate join cloth. 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 uh 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 weekendet again. Hey, thanks for having me. Uh awesome to you 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. Yeah. I'm in Portland. Portland, Oregon, but same time zone. Same time zone. We want you here to explain uh how relevant it is for Califa to acquire replicate. What does that mean for developers? Oh my gosh, Joe, we just had our um I have some new people on my team from from the replicate merger that that happened and we uh they are so awesome and I have always used replicate. Like I had you used replicate before the purchase 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 in and see what the inputs are. So you can see like I have this idea is this going to work and like I this is going to 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 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 it's wild that that that exists. We were just we were we just had this they were given a really awesome de demo uh getting our team up to speed with with what we could build with it which is literally anything but uh showing us as we went and one of them there was a give us an audio file right so 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 uh that old video game where the notes would drop and you'd have to press that 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 what you can build and what you can experiment with and like in the 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 uh last week, Bite Dance released uh Cadream 4.5. It's awesome. I've been playing with it. I've been playing with it on Replicate because it's there. Uh and 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 uh Cloudflare apps. Um oftent times 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 it goes away because often times 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 they're they cach it for about about an hour. So it'll 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 this I built I I built this app and I'll share it here. I'll share it in a bit. It's called Slideroki. Right? So we were trying to introduce our teams to how how we do things. And you you put in we said you get seven minutes. Just imagine this. You 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 I did the thing that all the kids are doing. Uh uh we want to get you those points that you would want somebody to know but just go rough with it. And and then I had it generate slides. So not only does it have so I I use all replicate models for this. So I used 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 the these were doing. And like I I said try to make it weird because I we wanted to have like the live experience because you didn't know it was like slide so you 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 realalistic turtle that was pointing at uh 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 it all worked and 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 it's more than like I'm going to write this down on a napkin fast, right? Really fast. So fast. Yeah. And the the the coding world that we're living in now where you can do that sort of stuff, right? So super super fun. Um 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. is 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 of 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 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 uh build on our our tools as well. So, I think that there's also this really nice merger. We had a happy hour uh just uh I was going to say last week, but it was just a couple days ago. Uh 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 the energy in the room was awesome. It was so cool to see what 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. And 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 I've got a I've got a lizard. My 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 Laura's. And it's a really easy way to go I could go build it and I could put that him in any scene after I give it like 10 10 to 15 pictures. I could put that lizard anywhere I wanted. Him surfing, him doing what whatever you can imagine, but like specifically him. So, it's a really nice like opportunity um uh to explore in that space, too, because there's a lot of things that um uh 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 uh what should people where should people start if they want to start something right now? Do we have something? Yeah, absolutely. Uh head to the replicate uh.com. Head to replicate.com. F first of all follow us cloudflare devs on Twitter. We're we're doing you know cross tweeting now. And also follow replicate on Twitter. It's it's replicate. And then I want you to uh go to replicate.com. There's an explorer tab. uh they've done an excellent job of maintaining like what can you do with this and and it is overwhelming but just take a breath take a breath and go through there and look and think about you're going I guarantee you within 3 to four minutes there'll be oh I would always wanted to build something like that and you can it's there maybe we could um 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 here'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 uh some credits out with you. That's great. That's really great. Actually, one of the things that uh 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 uh and it was uh you you can definitely see and you can use images of course you can put like content in a very cool way and does 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 I think that like we need we need a little bit better of an interface uh in front of it to 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 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 ChachiPT. A demo on that from Steve. Nice. It's quite nice actually. GK and the chat GPT app, right? Because they're starting to push apps out there. Yeah, that's coming. That's so cool. And and all all fully hosted and pushed through us, right? Through cloud player 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, Joe. Thanks for having me on the show. That's a wrap.