Honestly love Replicate for always being up to date. It’s amazing that not only do we live in a time of rapid AI advancement, but that every new research grade model is immediately available via API and can be used in prod, at scale, no questions asked.
Something to be said about distributors like Replicate etc that are adding an exponent to the impact of these model releases
I have no affiliation with either company but from using both a bunch as a customer: Replicate has a competitor at https://fal.ai/models and FAL's generation speed is consistently faster across every model I've tried. They have some sub-100 ms image gen models, too.
Replicate has a much bigger model selection. But for every model that's on both, FAL is pretty much "Replicate but faster". I believe pricing is pretty similar.
Founder of Replicate here. We should be on par or faster for all the top models. e.g. we have the fastest FLUX[dev]: https://artificialanalysis.ai/text-to-image/model-family/flu...
If something's not as fast let me know and we can fix it. ben@replicate.com
Hey Ben, thanks for participating in this thread. And certainly also for all you and your team have built.
Totally frank and possibly awkward question, you don't have to answer: how do you feel about a16z investing in everyone in this space?
They invested in you.
They're investing in your direct competitors (Fal, et al.)
They're picking your downmarket and upmarket (Krea, et al.)
They're picking consumer (Viggle, et al.), which could lift away the value.
They're picking the foundation models you consume. (Black Forest Labs, Hedra, et al.)
They're even picking the actual consumers themselves. (Promise, et al.)
They're doing this at Series A and beyond.
Do you think they'll try to encourage dog-fooding or consolidation?
The reason I ask is because I'm building adjacent or at a tangent to some of this, and I wonder if a16z is "all full up" or competitive within the portfolio. (If you can answer in private, my email is [my username] at gmail, and I'd be incredibly grateful to hear your thoughts.)
Beyond that, how are you feeling? This is a whirlwind of a sector to be in. There's a new model every week it seems.
Kudos on keeping up the pace! Keep at it!
That feels like the VC equivalent of buying a market-specific fund, so fairly par for the course?
A16Z invested in both. It's wild. They've been absolutely flooding the GenAI market for images and videos with investments.
They'll have one of the victors, whoever it is. Maybe multiple.
That's less on the downstream distributors, more on the model developers themselves realizing that ease-of-accessibility of the models themselves on Day 1 is important for getting community traction. Locking the model exclusively behind their own API won't work anymore.
Llama 4 was another recent case where they explicitly worked with downstream distributors to get it working Day 1.