I’m Dom, one of the engineers here at Replicate. My background is web engineering, not machine learning. I have a pretty good sense of what machine learning can do from the outside – image generation, detecting objects in images, self-driving cars – but only a faint idea of how it actually works on the inside. I studied some AI as part of my degree, many years ago, which gives me a basic (if very out of date) grounding in things like neural networks, but that’s a long way off knowing what it’s like to actually build machine learning models.
Luckily for me I work with a team of people who have PhDs in this stuff, so I’ve been working with our co-founder Andreas to learn more about how it works.
One of the models on Replicate that I’ve found most fascinating is CLIPDraw. You give it a prompt, it generates a whole bunch of random squiggles on a canvas, and then slowly morphs those squiggles into something representing your prompt. It’s nowhere near as configurable nor refined as something like pixray/text2image, but it somehow feels much more human and grokkable in the way it uses paths to create an image.
My desktop is full of outputs from this model, so it was the natural choice when choosing something to work on.
