Releasing Salt AI in Alpha

Building blocks for a new era of creation and collaboration with generative AI
Alex Duffy
Alex Duffy
May 9, 2024

Today, we stand on the brink of a new generation of tools – tools that will equip people and teams with the world’s most powerful technologies to achieve real-world goals. Platforms like Notion and Figma have changed the way we interact with digital tools, but AI is set to revolutionize creative tooling even further. For the first time, builders and makers aren’t limited by checkboxes, knobs, and sliders. Instead, natural language, images, video, and 3D are becoming the inputs and outputs that redefine how we interface with the tools we use to create everything from art to software.

Creating tools that allow more of the world to realize the promise of AI takes more than just great technology – it demands rapid experimentation and feedback; stable, scalable infrastructure; and a way for developers working at the cutting edge to easily share their work with those most eager to use it. That’s why we’re building Salt, a visual AI application builder and distribution network.

Our vision for Salt is to bring together the world's best AI developers with the people and organizations that can benefit from their work. Our proprietary autoscaling infrastructure, workflow management platform, and ecosystem offer developers a uniquely efficient distribution channel to put stable diffusion and LLM workflows in the hands of real users. Without the constraints of a single machine, usage can scale up to service millions of users simultaneously and scale down to save costs. 

Starting today, developers can sign up on getsalt.ai to access our alpha. This preview of the Salt platform makes it easy to ship powerful AI workflows directly to Discord with an integrated ComfyUI experience, free GPUs, and one-click deployments to the Salt AI bot, which can be added to any server. 

A workflow ready for deloyment in the Salt dashboard (left), and the same workflow when deployed in Discord (right)
A workflow ready for deployment in the Salt AI dashboard (left) and once shared in Discord (right)

The paradigm shift we’re building for

In every technological era, there emerges an opportunity to create ecosystems where everyone benefits – a moment where new tools and platforms reshape how we work, play, and create. In 2005, YouTube capitalized on advancements in video creation and distribution as well as an increased demand for video content. Creators were compensated and grew an audience. That audience benefited from content that enriched their lives. This wasn't just a new platform – it was a new paradigm for content creation and consumption.

Today, we have a new set of emergent truths that together create massive opportunities for the next paradigm shift:

While these market conditions are new, the key to harnessing their potential is in a development culture with well-established roots: the open-source community. For decades, software engineers and machine learning researchers have fueled innovation by sharing papers and often source code itself. Through this collaboration, an increasingly less technical audience can build increasingly more powerful tools standing on the shoulders of these innovators. 

One great example is ComfyUI. ComfyUI isn’t just a tool – its visual interface is a bridge connecting developers, designers, product teams, and end-users, making AI application development more intuitive and accessible. When we set out to build Salt, it was clear that the accessibility of a visual interface like ComfyUI should serve as the foundation for building on this new platform.

A text-to-image workflow made with ComfyUI
A text-to-image workflow using ComfyUI

What we believe

As we build toward a future where the transformative power of AI can benefit as many people as possible, we believe there is an opportunity to design an ecosystem where everyone’s incentives are aligned. Here are the hypotheses that drive our approach:

If Salt can:

Developers will:

And end users (creatives, non-technical domain experts, enterprises) will:


Our commitments

As we work to deliver on our piece of this puzzle, we’re guided by a set of commitments to how we’ll tackle the biggest challenges:

Integration

Deployment

Distribution

How you can help

We hope you’re as excited about shaping the tools of tomorrow as we are, and we invite you to be an integral part of our journey. 

Sign up for the alpha

Head to https://getsalt.ai and create your account to start building, managing, and deploying AI workflows using our alpha version. To show our appreciation, we’re offering the first 100 developers who sign up free access to L4 GPUs with 24GB of VRAM for the entire month of March. It’s our way of saying thank you for being early adopters and contributing to our mission. Yes, there will be bugs – it's part of the adventure – but your feedback is crucial as we improve the platform!

Join us on Discord

Head to the Salt AI Discord to share your creations, discover workflows from other developers, give us your feedback, and connect with our community of over 30k AI enthusiasts. Add the Salt AI bot to any server to start sharing and running workflows in your favorite communities.

Stay tuned for more

In just a month, we’ll kick off Tessellate, a series of community challenges where developers can submit their best open source workflows for use cases like gaming, 3D design, fashion, and music and compete for huge prizes and partnership opportunities. Keep an eye on our Discord and socials for more details.

We’ve got big plans to transform the innovative potential of AI into a superpower ready to be harnessed by all, and we’re just getting started. Join us as we build the future together!

Alex Duffy

VP of AI at Salt