Show HN: Pretrained models (GPT-2, CLIP, etc.) APIs for building web apps

Hi all, I recently built https://pretrained.convect.ml.

I’ve been interested in the potential for building web apps on top of pretrained models that have been gaining popularity in the machine learning community. One foundational piece for these apps would be access to predictions by these models with fast response times. So, I’ve made models available via an API for a few AI tasks:

1) Text generation (GTP-2, GPT-Neo 125M, and PEGASUS for paraphrasing): Provide text and generate more text with a similar style and content. Use these models to build an AI writing assistant or even synthesize entire articles.

2) Computer vision (CLIP): Measure the association between any sequence of images to a list of arbitrary texts. Use CLIP in an app to detect vehicles, animals, trees, household appliances, or other physical objects that you can describe with words.

3) Conversation (Blenderbot 400M Distill): Build an AI-powered chatbot that responds to user inputs. TBH Blenderbot’s responses don’t always make sense, so I’d be careful with this one.

4) Article summarization (Bart Large CNN): Generate a summary of the salient points in an article. Use this model to build tools to help people consume information faster.

5) Text classification (Bart Large MultiNLI): Measure the association between any sequence of words to a list of arbitrary text labels. A classification model can be used to detect topics, e.g. send customer call center transcripts to this API to detect if customers are reaching out about specific topics of interest, such as product defects or payment discrepancies.

6) Sentiment analysis (DistilBERT base uncased finetuned SST-2): Detect the sentiment of a piece of text. This model, for example, could be used to measure overall customer approval levels for a product from social media posts.

Many of the endpoint response times are sub-second and could be used in applications to provide a near-real-time experience. I have also included CodePens (in React) for each of the models to make it easy to get started with building on top of them. All the endpoints handle preflight requests from any origin, so applications can be purely browser-based if you want to do that.

I’m not the first to make these models available for free over an API but am hoping to make the experience of getting started as easy as possible. I’d also love to chat with anyone who has been curious about using these models in their projects or if there’s a particular model that you wish was readily available as an API endpoint.