Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the most recent updates and exclusive content on top-tier AI coverage.
Lightning AI, the company behind the widely-used open-source framework PyTorch Lightning, has introduced Lightning AI Studios. This new offering is an enterprise-level, all-in-one cloud platform designed for building and deploying AI products at scale.
Lightning AI claims that their end-to-end SaaS platform fundamentally transforms how developers work. It does this by removing all non-core activities and providing a single interface catering to all AI development needs. Users can utilize ready-made templates, easily scale from CPU to GPU across multiple machines, and use integrated tools or create their own while deploying on any platform—be it their cloud, Lightning AI’s cloud, or a local GPU cluster.
William Falcon, the founder and CEO of Lightning AI, envisions a significant transformation: akin to moving from a flip phone to an iPhone. He introduced this vision during a virtual demo.
Falcon describes Lightning AI Studios as an operating system for AI developers and a collaborative cloud-based workspace that brings together all necessary apps in one place, much like a smartphone combines various functionalities. He notes that machine learning tools have remained largely unchanged for decades, but that is now changing.
Three years ago, Falcon started working on Grid.ai, the predecessor to Lightning AI. The venture raised $18.6 million in a Series A round to support AI researchers and engineers in bringing their models to production. At that time, the idea of training models in the cloud was introduced.
Falcon believes coding on a laptop is inefficient for AI and saw the need for a new approach — thinking of themselves as the “Apple for machine learning.” Fast forward three years, and he believes this iPhone-like experience is now available, fully cloud-based. With Lightning AI Studios, AI developers can start building AI products with just one click and on one screen, enjoying features such as rapid setup, easy integration, and a marketplace of apps for building, training, fine-tuning, and deploying models.
The platform offers various apps, including those for self-service inference APIs for leading open-source LLMs like Llama2, CodeLlama, and Mistral; fine-tuning LLMs on user data; full LLM pre-training on user data; Stable Diffusion (including recent variants like LCM); fine-tuning and generation; LLM evaluation; multimodal image and language chat APIs; and quickstart tools for vision, audio, and text.
Falcon believes that Lightning AI Studios is ready to compete with Google Colab and AWS Sagemaker, describing these established tools as “gen 1” cloud products, similar to how the Blackberry was before the iPhone came along. He mentioned there is a waitlist of 27,000 individuals eager to use Lightning AI Studios, with nearly 1,000 new users already onboarded.
Lightning AI Studios offers four pricing tiers: a free level for individual students, researchers, and hobbyists; a pro level for engineers, researchers, and scientists; a team level for start-ups and teams; and an enterprise level for larger organizations requiring enterprise-grade AI.
To sign up for early access to Lightning AI Studios, visit the Lightning AI website.