I think the article is more about why Cloudflare thought that was a valuable proposition.

Why do I have a shovel? Because I transferred $48 to Home Depot's bank account.

came here to put this comment exactly ;)

The term "joining" irritates me more than it should, because you're correct in asking "What is the value of the transaction?". My guess is that they aren't joining anything, CloudFlare bought the company and is keeping the team.

It's a pretentious way of saying they acquired them. https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/acquisitions/

> What was the value of the transaction?

I think this is being intentionally kept under wraps, so nobody who can say anything knows.

The did explain a little bit:

> We’ll be able to do things like run fast models on the edge, run model pipelines on instantly-booting Workers, stream model inputs and outputs with WebRTC, etc.

Benefit to 3rd party developers is reducing latency and improving robustness of AI pipeline. Instead of going back and forth with https request at each stage to do inference you could make all in one request, e.g. doing realtime, pipelined STT, text translation, some backend logic, TTS and back to user mobile device.

Me too. After trying it out I found Cog to be super frustrating to use and the only use case for me ended-up being trying out a new model through the web UI occasionally.

Tech is full of ironies. 5 years ago cloudflare was held as the savior of internet. People in HN and tech in general put them on pedestal. 1.1.1.1, generous ddos protection, cdn, adn to name a few.

Fastforward to today, they being hated foe bringing down the internet, compared to failing giants.

I think it is a reminder that evil and good recides within oneself.

Their entire business model is effectively centralizing the web. The downtime over the last two weeks shows some of the problem with that.

I have used their products and have more favor toward them than I do for the corporations you're referring to, but ultimately my question is the same.

They are already? See the football debacle in Spain. It's not their fault, legally and technically, but if everything wasn't centralized by them, it wouldn't happen.

I thought they were already on that list.

I hate them a bit already, but beyond bringing down parts of the internet from time to time and occasional captchas, they are not an everyday annoyance like Google, Microsoft, and the rest.

Cloudflare has made considerable improvements in running small models in gpu's world-wide ( loading multiple small models).

I think they want to be the provider of inference for specialized slm's. Replicate is a perfect acquisition for that, they have a large catalog of smaller models.

With the acquisition they are saying that they have made enough improvements for the next step, earning money from those improvements.

500mil would be roughly 12.5% of a available liquid assets for cloudflare.

They are a huge, huge middleman of internet traffic and many, many services.

Cloud flare taking a strong anti ai scraping stance. Then turning around and acquiring an AI hosting service also feels contradictory