Ben Firshman
Co-founder & CEO, Replicate · 1 appearance on the record.
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founderexecutiveengineer@bfirsh ↗firshman.com ↗
Ben Firshman is the co-founder and CEO of Replicate, a cloud platform for running and fine-tuning open-source AI models. Prior to Replicate, he created Fig, which was acquired by Docker and became Docker Compose, and worked as Director of Product Management at Docker.
16statements → 4claims → 2claims resolved → 3.88/5average certainty → 1.75/5average debate potential →
0 supported 1 partly supported 1 contradicted 2 not checkable as stated how the 4 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
4 assertions · 1 opinion · 6 insights · 5 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 4 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Ben argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable contradicted claim
Firshman: Early 2021 Discord AI bots originated Midjourney's collaborative interface
“It was the start of, it was the start of mid-journey, and, you know, it's where that kind of user interface came from. Like, what's beautiful about the user interface is, like, You could see what other people are doing, and that you could riff off other people…”
Everything Ben Firshman said on Latent Space that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Firshman: Academic ML researchers make poor software users due to six-month cycles
“And they were like, what was funny about that is they were like, not very good users. Like, they were doing great work, obviously, but the way that research worked is that they just made, like, one thing every six months, and they just fired and forgot it. Lik…”
Firshman: Early 2021 Discord AI bots originated Midjourney's collaborative interface
“It was the start of, it was the start of mid-journey, and, you know, it's where that kind of user interface came from. Like, what's beautiful about the user interface is, like, You could see what other people are doing, and that you could riff off other people…”
Firshman: GPU demand is not currently outpacing supply at Replicate
“From our point of view, demand is not outpacing supply of GPUs. Like we have enough, from our point of view, we have enough GPUs to go around, but that might change for sure.”
Firshman: Llama 2 costs $25M to train but $50 to fine-tune
“Lama II as a base model is that, like, yeah, it costs twenty five million dollars to train to start with, but then you can fine tune it for, like, 50 bucks.”
Firshman: Building Fig and Docker Compose in Python was a mistake
“We used Python, which was a big mistake, where Python's really hard to get booting up fast, because you have to load up the whole Python runtime before it can run anything.”
Firshman: CLIs are a more natural fit for LLMs than GUIs
“It's almost more natural to a CLI than it is in a graphical user interface, because it feels like there's back and forth with the computer. Yeah. Almost funnily like a language model. So I think there's some interesting intersection of like CLIs and language m…”
Firshman: Llama 2 release was Replicate's biggest week of growth ever
“Llama II was, like, our biggest week of growth ever, because, like, tons of people wanted to tinker with it and run it.”
Firshman: Indie hackers are among Replicate's largest spending customers
“Like a lot of these indie hackers are some of our largest customers, like alongside some of our biggest customers that you would think would be would be you know, spending a lot more money than them”
Firshman: Docker's value is its agreed-upon standard, not its software
“I think the magic of Docker is not really in the software. It's just like the standard that people have agreed on, like, here are a bunch of keys for a JSON document, basically. And you know, that was the magic of, like, the metaphor of real containerization a…”
Firshman: Dockerfiles are too complex for ML researchers to manage
“Dockerfiles are hard enough for software developers to write. I'm saying this with love as somebody who works on Docker and, like, works on Dockerfiles but it's really hard to use, and you need to know a bunch about Linux, basically, because you're running a b…”
Firshman: AI engineers do not need low-level PyTorch expertise
“The metaphor here is that you don't need to be digging down into like this sort of PyTorch level if you don't want to in the same way as a software engineer in the nineties. You don't need to be like understanding how network stacks work to be able to build a …”
Firshman: Software and CLIs must prioritize low latency for physical-like responsiveness
“Software should feel more like something that's real, where you touch, you pull a physical lever, and the physical lever moves, you know. And I've taken that lesson of kind of human interface to software a ton. You know, it's all about kind of low latency, it …”
Firshman: Replicate Entered Late YC Batch With No Product or Users
“We didn't have, we hadn't built a product. We had no users. We had no idea what our business was going to be because we couldn't get anybody to like buy something which doesn't exist. And actually there was quite a way through our, I think it was like two thir…”
Firshman: Replicate's API business originated from PixRay's NFT creator
“It was the creator of Pix Ray. Like it was, he generated NFT art. And so he like made a bunch of art with these models and was, you know, selling these NFTs effectively. And I think lots of people in his community were doing similar things. And like, he then r…”
Firshman: Replicate has 2M total users, not all developers
“Two million, I think that got mangled actually by, it's two million users. Not all those people are developers, but a lot of them are developers, yeah.”
Firshman: Replicate does not own production GPUs, relies on GCP and CoreWeave
“We don't own our own GPUs. We've got a few that we play around with, but not, not for production workloads, and we are primarily built on this public cloud, so primarily GCP and CoreWeave, and like, it's some smatterings elsewhere, and...”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| A Brief History of the Open Source AI Hacker - with Ben Firshman of Replicate | Feb 28, 2024 | 57m |