Workflows for the Real World: Introducing Salt

With the release of Salt AI in beta, the community can build, deploy, and scale powerful AI applications like never before
Salt Team
Salt Team
May 16, 2024

Today we released the beta version of Salt, a powerful new way to build, deploy, and scale AI workflows with ease. We’re excited to share our plans to democratize AI development, our vision for a future where AI applications can more seamlessly solve real-world problems for everyone, and how you can help.

Why did we build Salt AI?

Generative AI technology is truly remarkable, and the pace of innovation is faster than anything we’ve seen before. Like so many others, our team loves using tools like Midjourney, Chat-GPT, and Claude. They’re like magic to us. But then what? 

Today, the vast majority of people and organizations don’t have a clear, understandable path for adopting and deploying AI into their daily operations. As creative and technical builders, we became obsessed with the opportunity to bridge the gap between experimentation and a future where AI workflows could quickly go from idea, to proof-of-concept, to in the hands of millions of real users.

Our goal with Salt is to provide an end-to-end platform that will give anyone the opportunity to build, deploy and scale AI-powered solutions. There are three fundamental components to our vision: 

  1. An integrated, intuitive, and powerful development environment
  2. A marketplace that aligns incentives across the ecosystems and allows builders to distribute and monetize their work on their terms
  3. An elastic GPU cloud that seamlessly scales up to meet demand and scales down to save costs

So, where are we starting? 

Since launching our alpha, we’ve received valuable feedback from developers and creatives in the ComfyUI community. What we’ve learned is that while node-based programming has given way to some of the most forward-looking AI projects to date, there are frustrating limitations to how quickly and easily you can build and test ideas – not to mention setting up the infrastructure needed to bring them to life at scale. We set out to make this process less painful, and in turn, make AI more useful and available to more people. 

What makes Salt AI so good?

Today, Salt AI is designed with simplicity and efficiency in mind – cutting through the noise and providing a user-friendly and intuitive platform that lets you get started in seconds, not days. 

Here are a few of the ways we’re making life easier for builders now:

No machines, zero setup time

Salt’s cloud-based platform lets you start building workflows immediately in your web browser without any local software setup or infrastructure management. We handle all the heavy lifting so you can focus on creating.

A GIF showing the instant, cloud-based spin up of the workflow editor in Salt

From prototype to production in seconds

Once your workflow is ready, you can deploy it to a Discord bot that can run in any server with just one click. Soon, we’ll support the same streamlined process to deploy workflows to API.

A GIF showing the process of deploying an AI workflow to Discord on Salt

High performance, effortless scaling

Behind the scenes, Salt dynamically provisions and optimizes cloud compute resources - including GPU autoscaling. This allows your workflows to scale effortlessly and efficiently.

An IDE designed with pros in mind

With Salt, you have access to thousands of nodes and a web-based environment built for power users.

A GIF showing the pro-level workflow editor inside the Salt platform

What can you build on Salt AI?

The possibilities on Salt are virtually endless. Check out some examples generated by the latest workflows from our team:

Check out more example workflows and start using them on Salt here.

Our commitment to open source

We believe that great things are built through openness and collaboration. Since the beginning, we’ve regularly shared back to the community, and we’re just getting started. Here are some of our team’s open source contributions so far: 

Salt AI's documentation of over 1600 ComfyUI nodes on GitHub

Check out all of our custom nodes here.

Join us on the journey

First and foremost, we hope you’ll sign up and take Salt for a spin. 

Sign up for free

Then, let us know what you think! We couldn’t be more excited to share Salt with you, but it’s still early days. You may encounter some rough edges or missing pieces during the beta, and we need your help to make the platform better and more useful for everyone. You can help us do so in two main ways:

Let’s push the boundaries of what’s possible and build the future of AI together.