Substrate: Multi-step AI programs that run fast.

Substrate is the first inference API optimized for multi-step AI workloads. With Substrate, you connect nodes from a curated library that includes optimized ML models, built-in file and vector storage, a code interpreter, and logical control flow. By simply connecting nodes, you describe a graph program, which Substrate then analyzes and runs as fast as possible. Entire graphs of many nodes will often run on a single machine, with microsecond communication between tasks. We believe the most robust, reliable, and productive uses of AI are when many models are used in coordination with each other, with regular programming mixed in. Most people building with AI already know this. But the available tools are suboptimal, unless you work for Google. For the rest of us, we’re left creating an unwieldy mess of chained API calls to multiple providers, with many roundtrips in between. We took a hard look at this state of affairs, and recognized how much it is stifling progress. Building large multi-step AI workloads requires sophisticated high-performance tooling and infrastructure. Nobody wants to deal with more tooling and infrastructure… but everyone would benefit from simple, intuitive interfaces that abstract away a powerful system underneath. No tooling, no infrastructure – just elegant abstractions.