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Oct 31 2024

👋 Hey Instillers!


October brought exciting updates to power up your AI development! From web crawlers to ready-to-use AI assistants, we've packed this month with tools to accelerate your workflow. Plus, Python devs, we've got something special for you.


In this edition:

  • Web Crawlers for AI-Ready Data

  • Newly Improved Python SDK Launch

  • Instill Integrations

  • Happy Halloween & End of Hacktoberfest


Have questions? Join Office Hours on Discord: Tuesdays 3pm BST | Thursdays 6pm BST


Let's explore! 🚀


How Web Crawlers Transform Unstructured Data for AI Applications

Web scraping tools like FireCrawl are just the beginning. Turn your raw web data into actionable AI insights with our end-to-end ETL automation. We streamline the entire process—from extraction to transformation—so you can focus on building powerful AI applications.


Learn how to automate your web data pipeline in our latest blog.


Instill SDK for Python Devs

The Instill SDK provides a Python-based interface for interacting with Instill Core features, including  data, pipeline and model operations. Easily prepare your unstructured data for AI directly within your Python environment.


Ready to make your data AI-ready? Dive into our Cookbooks for hands-on examples, or check the Changelog to see what's new.


Instill Integrations

Introducing Instill Integrations: Your new hub for managing third-party connections. Securely store API keys and credentials for services like OpenAI and Pinecone, all in one place. Track authorized vendors and seamlessly connect them in your pipeline builder.


Learn more about Instill Integrations.

Happy Halloween & End of Hacktoberfest!

Congratulations to all the open-source contributors who made it through Hacktoberfest! Thank you for your contributions and we can’t wait to see & share what the community has built.


Your feedback is invaluable to us and if you have not submitted your contributions yet, please do so using this form.

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Sep 23 2024

Hello Instillers!


Here’s a quick summary of what happened over this month:


Got questions? Join Instill AI Office Hours on Discord! Every Tuesday at 3pm BST (GMT+1) or Thursday at 6pm BST (GMT+1).


Let’s dive in!


Join us at Instill AI's tentaculous Hacktoberfest 2024

Hacktoberfest is all about contributing towards the open-source community and we are excited to be part of it! If you are fascinated by AI and unsure where to start, this would be a great entry point! This year we have exciting new challenges and opportunities to win cool swag like Amazon Gift Cards worth USD $50.


Success Story with Academia Sinica’s BCG lab

"Our team has been developing deep learning models for biological image analysis independently until we discovered a better way to do it with Instill AI. Their attentive team saved us tons of time and precisely addressed our needs through AI automations to accelerate our research. We highly recommend Instill AI for their professionalism, expertise, and dedication to delivering high-quality solutions."

- Dr Yao-Cheng Lin


We partnered with Dr Yao-Cheng Lin's Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics group at Academia Sinica, Taiwan which led to StomaVision, an AI tool that automates stomatal image analysis, enhancing research efficiency.


Read the full success story or explore the instance segmentation colab notebook.

YouTube - OpenAI Structured Outputs and Web Scraping with Instill Cloud


Let’s build an LLM-powered knowledge curator

In our last blog, we explored OpenAI’s Structured Outputs against other tools such as Instructor, BAML, LangChain, etc. and discovered a multi-step process is key. Next we built a tutorial to show you how to best use Structured Outputs on Instill Cloud and share our top tips and learning outcomes.


Read the tutorial on our website or watch on YouTube.


OpenAI o1-preview & o1-mini on Instill Cloud

On Sep 12, OpenAI introduced the new early model called o1 and we have quickly added it onto Instill Cloud to give our users access to explore these models - hassle free thanks to Instill Credits. We built a quick pipeline to compare GPT-4o and o1-preview which you can try on Instill Cloud.


Try the pipeline NOW.

Introducing Instill AI Cookbooks

Python devs, we are introducing Instill AI Cookbooks (a collection of notebooks) to provide more ways to access AI solutions built with Instill Core and Instill Cloud. If you have an idea for a cookbook feel free to let us know or submit one yourself!


Check it out on GitHub.

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Aug 30 2024

Hello Instillers!


Here’s a quick summary of what happened over this month:


Got questions? Join Instill AI Office Hours on Discord! Every Tuesday at 3pm BST (GMT+1) or Thursday at 6pm BST (GMT+1).


Now, let’s dive in!


Building RAG is easy, preprocessing data is hard.

At Instill AI, we are on a mission to transform your unstructured data into AI-ready data. Building a basic RAG pipeline is easy, but preprocessing unstructured data and always retrieving highly relevant results, takes effort. Let’s Make Your Data AI-Ready together!  


See our new website for more.


From unstructured mess to AI-ready data

Instill Artifact, the final puzzle piece to Instill Core that completes our all-in-one, full-stack AI solution platform. Designed to tackle the 80% of global data that is unstructured, it seamlessly converts text, images, audio, and video into Instill Catalog, an augmented data catalog that unlocks the hidden potential in your information assets.


Read more about Instill Artifact in our blog or simply build your own Catalog and ask this pipeline!


Best way to generate Structured Outputs from LLMs

OpenAI introduced Structured Outputs on August 6th to enhance application reliability by ensuring model outputs match developer-provided JSON Schemas. We've swiftly updated our OpenAI Component to support this feature, accessible through the LLM model "gpt-4o-2024-08-06" and “gpt-4o-mini”.


Try this demo pipeline now!


Inspired by the recent publication, "Let Me Speak Freely? A Study on the Impact of Format Restrictions on Performance of Large Language Models" shows LLM reasoning capability is limited by structuring the output. We conducted our own experiment using GPT4o to benchmark the performance of OpenAI's new structured outputs feature against Instructor, Marvin, BAML, TypeChat and LangChain.


Read our blog or checkout this cookbook for more!

More components means more possibilities

Instill Core has expanded with new AI, data, and application components, broadening your toolkit for creating powerful data solutions. These additions offer greater flexibility and enable more advanced data processing workflows. For more details, refer to our Changelogs:



Join us at Big Data LDN 2024

Big Data LDN, UK's leading free-to-attend data, analytics, and AI conference & exhibition, is happening on 18-19 September at Olympia London. Visit our booth at stand X123 and meet our expert AI engineers to discover solutions for your unstructured data challenges. We're excited to engage with the Data Community and to share more effective ways to data-drive the world.

Find us here on the Big Data LDN website.

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Jul 31 2024

Hello!


We’re thrilled to share several updates at Instill AI this month:


Added several new Components:

  • GitHub: Boost developer workflow with AI

  • Email: Streamline office productivity together with AI

  • Cohere: Advance NLP capabilities with Command, Embed, and Rerank

  • Anthropic: Claude 3 Family including Claude 3.5 Sonnet is here

  • Mistral AI: New AI possibilities with Codestral, Mixtral models


AI cost-optimisations with:

  • OpenAI: Updated the component with GPT-4o mini 🎉


Got questions on anything? Join Instill AI Office Hours on Discord!

Every Tuesday at 3 PM BST (GMT+1) or Thursday at 6 PM BST (GMT+1).


Now, let’s dive in!


🔮 Instill Core Hits 2,000 GitHub Stars! 🌟

Thank you to our incredible community! Your support drives us to keep improving our source-available AI infrastructure tool - 🔮 Instill Core - enabling us to:

  • 🚀 Empower AI developers worldwide via data pipeline, & model orchestration

  • 🔓 Make AI observability more accessible through no-code pipelines

  • 🤝 Build a better community with Open Office Hours on Discord


We're on a mission to simplify AI development, and we couldn't do it without you! 🫶


Don't forget to check out our latest Changelog for new updates and send us any feedback or future feature requests on GitHub!


Cost-efficiency with small LLMs - GPT4o-mini

We recently updated our OpenAI Component with the new GPT-4o mini - currently the most cost-efficient small LLM in the market!

  • ✅ Low cost & latency for diverse tasks

  • ✅ Text & vision API support

  • ✅ Enhanced non-English text processing

  • ✅ 99.5% cost reduction per 1,000 Input Tokens vs GPT-4



New AI Components 🎉 Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Rerank, Codestral…

We've expanded our AI Components on 🔮 Instill Core with several new models:

  • Cohere: Advance NLP capabilities with Command, Embed, and Rerank

  • Anthropic: Claude 3 Family including Claude 3.5 Sonnet is here

  • Mistral AI: New AI possibilities with Codestral, Mixtral models


☁️ Checkout these demos on Instill Cloud



Devs: Supercharge GitHub workflows with AI 🚀

Ever struggled with reviewing code or naming your commit messages? Just use our platform's AI Components with the new GitHub Component!


☁️ Checkout these pipelines on Instill Cloud:


Build Smarter Emails 💌

Build smarter emails with the new Email Component using the Mail Protocol for send and read tasks.


Things you could build with this 🤔 …

  • AI-generated email content, sent automatically

  • Smart email summaries turned into actionable to-do lists

  • … and more!



Got questions? Join Instill AI’s Weekly Office Hour!

Join Instill AI Office Hour 👉 on Discord.


Weekly Schedule:

⏰ Tuesday at 3 PM BST (GMT+1)

⏰ Thursday at 6 PM BST (GMT+1)


This will be a 2 part session:

  • (1) Latest Feature Showcase: What's new at Instill AI. All are welcome to participate & discuss.

  • (2) Q/A: Ask us anything! Got questions or issues? The team is here to help!


See you there! 👋

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Jul 08 2024

Hello!


We’re happy to share the latest updates at Instill AI:


We appreciate each and every contributor towards our open-source project.

If you’ve got a few seconds, please support us with a star on Github! 🌟


Now, let’s dive in!


Easily Manage Resources with Namespace Switch

Namespace Switch makes it easier for you to toggle between your individual or organization's namespace. Now you can use Instill Credits more efficiently!



Press Release featuring
Instill AI <> Numbers Protocol Workshop

Back in May 2024, we hosted a hackathon & workshop in Taipei with Numbers Protocol. Participants used Numbers Protocol on ☁️ Instill Cloud to develop AI applications with high data integrity. Numbers Protocol also demonstrated how blockchain ensures content authenticity and introduced C2PA solutions for traceability and responsible AI.

Read it on Taiwan News Hub (mandarin only).



Got questions? Join our Weekly Office Hour!

🔮 Instill Core is continuously improving and we want to make sure you have a place to come hang out & ask questions! See our community on 👉 Discord!


Weekly schedule:

⏰ Tuesday at 3PM BST (GMT+1)

⏰ Thursday at 9PM BST (GMT+1)


Get answers to...

  • What is 🔮 Instill Core? How does it work?

  • Should I use 🔮 Instill Core for building AI? Why?

  • What’s happening in the future at Instill AI?


Join any time to discuss, ask questions or troubleshoot issues.

See you there! 🫶


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Jun 24 2024

Hello!


We’re thrilled to share the latest updates at Instill AI:


We are working hard on each initiative to enhance your experience and expand Instill Core’s capabilities. Join our Discord community to share your feedback!


Now, let’s dive in!


Instill Credit 🌟 10,000 free credits every month!


10,000 free credits available every month!?


Yes you heard that right! You can now enjoy FREE Instill Credits 🎉 in addition to the Bring Your Own API Key (BYOK) feature. This grants you easy access to AI models like OpenAI's GPT-4 without the hassle of registering your own 3rd-party vendor account.


Check out the supported AI tasks and models 👉 here.


Learn more about how Instill Credit works by visiting our latest changelog and docs.


Boost Your Workforce with Slack 🚀


The new addition of the Slack component in Instill Core streamlines your workflow and communication.


You can build cool stuff like:

  • Send Slack messages to LLM and get helpful insights and actions powered by AI 💡

  • Automate routine tasks, freeing up your team to focus on higher-value work 🦾



May 2024 Hackathon End 🎉


We are excited to announce the successful conclusion of the May 2024 Instill AI Hackathon. Congratulations to the winners! 👑


Checkout the awesome pipelines they built with Instill Cloud:


👉 Read more on our blog


Workshop in Taipei: Hands-on Learning 💻


On May 18th, we hosted a local workshop in Taipei. We had an impressive 84% attendance rate 🎉 and are pleased to report a satisfaction score of 4.65 out of 5. For those who missed it, check out the Workshop Talk Slide.


Thank you to all the participants who came to learn more about building innovative real-world AI applications with us at Instill AI 🫶.


If you want more events like this, feel free to share your feedback with us on our Discord community.


See you again soon!

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May 03 2024

Hello!


We hope this update finds you well. We're excited to share the newest developments and improvements from our products. This includes the rollout of multi-region support for Instill Cloud, the availability of Llama3-8B-Instruct—the most powerful openly available LLM to date on Instill Cloud, secret management for pipeline connector configuration, and our exciting collaboration with InfuseAI, supported by Innovate UK.


Let’s dive in!


Instill Cloud: Multi-Region Expansion 🌐


Instill Cloud platform has now extended its reach across multiple regions!


Starting from Europe, we're thrilled to announce our expansion into Asia and the United States, ensuring enhanced accessibility and performance for users across diverse geographical locations. This marks a significant milestone in Instill Cloud's global expansion journey, reinforcing our commitment to delivering seamless cloud solutions worldwide.

Try Instill Cloud Now


Llama3-8B-Instruct Model on Instill Cloud 🦙


On April 18th, Meta unveiled the Llama 3 series, its most advanced openly available LLM to date. For more information, visit here. Now, you can access the Llama3-8B-Instruct model on Instill Cloud!


Here are the steps to use it:

  • Log in to Instill Cloud.

  • Use our provided pipeline to compare the capabilities of Llama 3 and Llama 2 side by side.

Try Llama3-vs-Llama2 Pipeline

Alternatively, you can directly call the model. See the API request below:

Remember to replace <INSTILL CLOUD API TOKEN> in the API request with your own Instill Cloud API Token.


Secret Management for Connector Configuration


We've made some big improvements to how you set up your pipeline connectors, especially when it comes to managing sensitive information like API keys. Now, you can create encrypted secrets for added security and reusability. These secrets are accessible when specifically referenced in the connector setup.


Follow our step-by-step guide to set up the OpenAI connector using your API key.

Setting Up the OpenAI Connector with Your API Key


🔜 Instill Credit Coming Soon


In addition to the above Bring Your Own API Key (BYOK) feature, get ready for Instill Credit, coming soon to Instill Cloud! Enjoy FREE Instill Credits, granting access to AI models like OpenAI's GPT-4 without the hassle of registering your own 3rd-party vendor account. Stay tuned for updates!


Innovate UK Supports Our Vision for Full-Stack Generative AI Infrastructure


We at Instill AI, along with Taiwan's InfuseAI, are excited to announce a significant new collaboration. Under the banner Optimising Industry Dynamics: A Performance-Persistent AI System Adaptable to Rapid Data and Model Changes, this project is jointly funded by Innovate UK and the A+ Industrial Innovative R&D Program in Taiwan, with a shared funding pool of up to £2 million.


🔎 Why This Matters


This joint initiative is set to revolutionize the AI and data industries by addressing critical challenges such as enhancing non-English LLM applications, breaking through the context window limits, and tackling the persistent issue of domain or concept drift. Our goal is to extend the capabilities of AI systems, making them more dynamic and effective across various languages and cultural contexts.


👉 Read our announcement on our blog article.

Schedule a call with us

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Apr 08 2024

Hello!

 

We hope this update finds you well, bringing you the latest enhancements to our projects, including the powerful LLaVA model, versatile jq task integration, and the efficient iterator component for advanced data processing solutions.


Let’s dive in!


GitHub Project Restructure



The vdp repository has been renamed to instill-core, marking it as the primary codebase for our Instill Core project.


Check Repository


New Model


LLaVA (acronym of Large Language and Visual Assistant) is a promising open-source generative AI model that replicates some of the capabilities of OpenAI GPT-4 in conversing with images. The most compelling features of LLaVA are its ability to improve upon other open-source solutions while using a simpler model architecture and orders of magnitude less training data. These characteristics make LLaVA not only faster and cheaper to train, but also more suitable for inference on consumer hardware.

For more details,
check out our tutorial on harnessing the power of  LLaVA-v1.6-13B with Instill Model.


Try Example Pipeline


New Component Task


jq is a lightweight and flexible command-line JSON processor that allows you to slice, filter, map, and transform structured data with a simple, expressive syntax. It reads JSON input and filters it using specific expressions, enabling efficient data manipulation and retrieval.

The jq task can be utilized within the JSON operator in VDP. Just add a JSON operator into your pipeline and select TASK_JQ to seamlessly integrate jq tool into your workflow.


For more details about integrating jq into your workflow, check out our documentation.


Try Example Pipeline


New Component


iterator ( [ 🌽 , 🐮 , 🐓 ] , cook ) =>  [ 🍿 , 🥩 , 🍗 ]


The iterator processes each data element individually within an array or list. This mechanism is essential for normalizing, filtering, or enriching data on an item-by-item basis, facilitating effective data processing.


For example, in webpage summarization tasks, given the substantial content of a webpage, the iterator is utilized to methodically process the content, segmented by tokens, enabling the efficient generation of concise summaries for each section.


Try Example Pipeline

More models and components are on the horizon!

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Jan 04 2024

Hey ,


Happy New Year!
As we welcome 2024, we'd like to start by sharing some good news from the past two months.

VDP GitHub Milestone ⭐️

Celebrating 1k stars on our VDP GitHub Project! A heartfelt thank you to our community for your unwavering support.


But we are never satisfied! We are aiming for 10K!

⭐️ Help VDP reach 10K

Beta Launch 🚀

We're thrilled to announce that Versatile Data Pipeline (VDP) is now in Beta. We're committed to avoiding any breaking changes and ensuring backward compatibility. This means smoother, more reliable integrations for you!

Instill Hub 🤝

Introduction to Instill Hub

Are you ready to create, share, and explore innovative AI workflows? 🚀


Instill Hub is The home for AI builders!

It stands at the forefront of Instill VDP, offering an extensive library of pre-built components and templates to power your projects with the most advanced AI infrastructure available. You can easily embrace the future of AI with Instill Hub and become part of a vibrant community dedicated to pushing the boundaries of technology.

🥳  Explore Instill Hub Now

Product Update 🤩

Over the past months, we've been hard at work bringing plenty of fantastic new features and improvements to the table. Let's dive right into what's fresh and buzzing:

New Connectors

  • Website Connector: Effortlessly scrape websites to enrich your AI projects

  • Redis Connector: Keep track of your chat histories with the new LLM support

  • Google Search Connector: Brings text and HTML data from Google Search results directly into your pipeline

  • OpenAI Connector:

    • GPT-4 Turbo: OpenAI’s latest generation model

    • GPT-4V: Analyze image inputs provided by the user

    • TTS: Transform texts into lifelike speech.

    • DALL·E 3: Transform texts into high-quality images

New Operators

  • Image Operator: Simplify overlay analysis on images.

  • Text Operator: Convert various document formats to plain text efficiently.

  • Base64 Operator: Quickly encode and decode Base64 strings.

New AI Models on Instill Model

  • Llama 2-7b

  • MPT-7b

  • Mistral-7b

  • Zephyr-7b

  • Stable Diffusion XL

  • ControlNet Canny


These models are put into our ecosystem for a unified and seamless AI experience.

🚀  Try Instill Cloud

Event Highlights 🎉

Neo Star Awards at Meet Taipei

📆  2023/11/30-2023/12/1

📍  Taipei, Taiwan

Instill AI was recognized as one of the top 30 startups at the Neo Star Awards 2023. This award emphasizes our innovative impact on the AI industry. The award was presented at the Neo Star Demo Show during Meet Taipei's 10th Anniversary Exhibition, Asia's largest startup festival, sharing its innovative solutions with 400+ international startups. We have a booth in the exhibition for attendees to explore our technology.


Instill AI also received the Special Award from Deloitte and the Third Place Award at Meet Taipei Neo Star. This recognition is a testament to our dedication to innovation and excellence. We are grateful for this acknowledgement, which motivates our mission to revolutionize AI.


Check out the English press of the Neo Star Demo Show.

Plug and Play Accelerator Program

📆  2023/11/28

📍  Alberta, Canada

Instill AI was selected to participate in the prestigious Plug and Play Sector Agnostic Program. At the renowned Plug and Play Expo in Alberta, Canada, we had the privilege of being featured on the Enterprise AI Startup Panel, where we demonstrated our cutting-edge product.

Protecting Creativity in the Age of AI

📆  2023/12/14

📍  London, UK

Instill AI co-hosted an exclusive event "Protecting Creativity in the Age of AI" with Numbers Protocol and King's College London. This unique event brought together innovative minds to discuss the impact of AI on creativity and intellectual property. Our CEO, Ping-Lin, was one of the panelists in the "Tech Panel - Unveiling AI’s Potential: Transformative Technologies in the Creative Sector". It was an honour to share the stage with esteemed panelists and learn together in the world of AI.

Event Recap: AI & Creativity - Insights from 'Protecting Creativity in the Age of AI

Goodbye 2023, Hello 2024 🎉

As we bid farewell to 2023, a year of growth and innovation, we're grateful to all of you who journeyed with us. Your support, contributions, and enthusiasm have been the fuel for our innovation and success.


As we've now stepped into 2024, we're filled with excitement for the opportunities that are already unfolding. We're eager to continue shaping the future, breaking new ground, and transforming the world with AI.


We hope you've had a joyful start to the New Year! Here's to making more breakthroughs together in 2024!


Stay tuned for more exciting updates and developments from Instill AI.

As always, happy building! 🎉



Best,

Shih-Chun Huang

Developer Advocate @ Instill AI

🚀 Join our Discord Community
Oct 24 2023

Hey ,


We're thrilled to reconnect with you after a brief hiatus, and we've got a lot to share. Starting now, you can expect our monthly newsletter to keep you informed, engaged, and inspired. So, let's dive into the latest updates and exciting developments!


Product Updates


Over the past few months, we've been hard at work bringing some fantastic new features and improvements to the table. Let's dive right into what's fresh and buzzing:

🙌🏻 Build, test, release and share pipelines

  • 🔨 Build pipelines to supercharge versatile AI features in your applications

  • 🧪 Test pipelines visually with a single click to see what's happening at each step

  • 🔄 Release pipelines with semantic versioning

  • 🔗 Foster collaboration by effortlessly sharing and cloning pipelines

📝 Build pipelines faster using ready-to-use templates

We're absolutely thrilled to introduce you to these valuable use cases. Now, you don't have to start from scratch - simply pick from these templates to tackle real-world challenges effortlessly.

⭐️ Help VDP reach 1K

🔆 Instill Python and TypeScript SDKs

Integrate seamlessly

We couldn't be more excited to present the Instill Python SDK and Typescript SDK. These nifty frameworks make it a breeze to integrate the power of VDP pipelines and Instill Model into your Python or Typescript applications.


To kickstart your journey with these SDKs, just follow these links:

🔆 Instill CLI

Bringing the power of Instill AI to your command line

We are thrilled to announce Instill CLI, which is your all-in-one solution for harnessing the power of Instill AI right from your command line!


Eager to dive into the CLI world and turbocharge your Instill AI experience? Get started by visiting our GitHub Repo: Instill CLI GitHub Repo.

🔆 Pinecone, BigQuery, Google Cloud Storage Connectors
Exciting Data Connectors to Enhance Your Apps

Discover a world of possibilities with our innovative new AI connectors, designed to elevate your applications to the next level.

  • Pinecone Connector: Unleash the Power of Embeddings

  • BigQuery Connector: Seamlessly Access Large Volumes of Data

  • Google Cloud Storage Connector: Tap into Vast Online Resources




Stay in the loop with the freshest updates! Give self-hosted Instill Core or Instill Cloud a spin. Exciting news: Instill Cloud is now up for grabs for FREE as a fully managed public cloud service during our Open Alpha phase. So, go ahead, dive in and happy building! 🛠️💪

🚀 Try Instill Cloud Free


Instill AI x Hacktoberfest


We're excited to announce our participation in Hacktoberfest! September has been a whirlwind as we prepare for this incredible journey. Hacktoberfest, a month-long event every October, promises exciting opportunities for you.


Event Highlights

  • Date: October 1, 2023 - October 31, 2023

  • Contribute with your coding expertise, share innovative pipelines, and create video/blog tutorials.


Join the Instill AI x Hacktoberfest event, showcase your skills, collaborate, and earn fantastic rewards.


Get started by visiting

Instill AI x Hacktoberfest Orientation

Exciting Rewards Await

  • Share/Repost our Hacktoberfest information on social media (Take X for example) or by giving us a star on GitHub for exclusive Instill Digital Stickers.

  • The top 30% of contributors receive an extraordinary Instill AI swag package with physical stickers and your choice of an Instill Bottle or Mug.

Help us spread the word and create a vibrant community of developers. Let's celebrate technology, collaboration, and open-source contributions together!

🚀 Join our Discord Community


Partnership/Events


9/14 - AI Meets Blockchain:

Shaping the Future of Digital Transparency


We are excited to announce a groundbreaking partnership with Numbers Co. 主張數據, a startup focused on data provenance infrastructure. This collaboration combines the strength of Numbers Protocol's blockchain technology with the dynamic nature of artificial intelligence, creating unique synergies that enhance user experiences and benefit the broader community.


On September 14th, Numbers Co. 主張數據 and Instill AI co-hosted a live demo session on YouTube. We explored the fascinating fusion of AI and blockchain, discussed the importance of blockchain in an AI-driven world, showcased live demos, and examined the synergies between AI and blockchain technologies.


During the live demo, you can discover how to use Instill Cloud to guide you through the process of converting AI-generated data into Web3 assets. This will provide valuable insights into building data pipelines that seamlessly integrate AI with provenance capabilities.


You can catch the replay of this groundbreaking event and dive deep into the cutting-edge application of these revolutionary technologies.

AI Meets Blockchain: Shaping the Future of Digital Transparency

Additionally, you can explore tutorials here: From Generative AI to Blockchain: Building an AIGC x Web3 Pipeline with Instill VDP | Tutorial.


9/27 - ILLA x Instill AI Hacktoberfest

Opening/Announcement Event

We are grateful to have been invited by ILLA Cloud to participate as one of the speakers at their Hacktoberfest opening on September 27th. During the event, we discussed our partnership with ILLA Cloud for Hacktoberfest and shared insights into Instill AI's open-source project. We also talked about how to celebrate Hacktoberfest with Instill AI.


If you missed the event, you could watch the replay to explore exciting topics about Instill AI and be a part of the Hacktoberfest experience.

Hacktoberfest Kick Off Streaming - By ILLA Cloud and Partners

So, grab your popcorn, sit back, relax, and enjoy the session from the comfort of your own screen. We can't wait for you to join us virtually!


We hope you enjoyed reading our October newsletter! Stay tuned for more exciting updates and developments from Instill AI. As always, happy building, and see you next month! 🚀🔥



Best,

Shih-Chun Huang

Developer Advocate @ Instill AI

🚀 Join our Discord Community

Jun 07 2023

Hey ,


I’m Xiaofei, co-founder of Instill AI. Knowing that you have expressed interest of Versatile Data Pipeline (VDP), I am reaching out to you to share our exciting news.


🎯 Introducing Instill Cloud in Open Alpha


We're thrilled to announce the long-waited release of Instill Cloud, a fully-managed cloud service for VDP, now available in Open Alpha.


Our goal in developing VDP is to make AI accessible to everyone. With a single line, you can launch VDP on local machines without the need to build from scratch to harness AI to process your unstructured data. However, we wanted to go even further. We understand that deploying, scaling, and managing infrastructure for unstructured data pipelines can be daunting, especially for those who are not tech-savvy or have limited resources. These challenges are real and not to be taken lightly.


What's great is that now you have the option to use Instill Cloud and experience the full power of VDP without any hassle. It is currently in Open Alpha testing phase - with all features FREE:

  • Support SYNC and ASYNC unstructured data pipelines for real-time and non-real-time AI-first applications respectively

  • Access to pre-trained ML models, such as YOLOv7, Mask R-CNN, Stable Diffusion and GPT

  • Unlimited pre-built data connectors

  • Unlimited API request

  • No credit card needed


👉 We can't wait for you to give it a try. Please join our Discord community to provide feedback and receive future product updates. We love any inputs as we strive to make Instill Cloud the best it can be 🙌!


🎯 What's next?


We are working on improving the user experience of VDP and Instill Cloud at a rapid pace. Here are some important features on the horizon:

  • Supporting flexible and complex pipelines through a DAG design

  • Decoupling the model deployment feature from VDP and introducing a standalone ModelOps platform called Instill Model to provide a more stable model import and inference experience

  • Introducing the Model Connector to connect AI models from different sources, whether they are third-party model providers or in-house model serving platforms. This will unlock numerous opportunities for VDP to integrate with popular model providers like OpenAI, Stability AI, Hugging Face, and, of course, Instill Model

  • Expanding support for more data connectors, including popular vector dbs


For more details, please check out our roadmap.


🚀 Try Instill Cloud Free 🚀


Best,

Xiaofei Du

Join our Discord

Dec 31 2022
Hey ,

It has been a tremendous year for Instill AI. VDP has grown from an idea in our minds into an open-source project used and loved by our community. Here are some numbers:
  • 🌱 5 AI tasks supported
  • 🔌 40+ Pre-built data connectors
  • ⚡️380,000+ trigger inferences
  • ⭐ 600+ stars on GitHub
  • 👋 160+ Community members
⭐️ Help VDP reach 1K

🚀 Product Updates

VDP: officially renamed to Versatile Data Pipeline

Ever since we launched VDP in August, we've been actively collecting feedback from our community. Along the way we've realised that as a general ETL infrastructure, VDP is in fact capable of processing all kinds of unstructured data.

We should not limit its usage to only visual data but to more versatile data. In addition, the term, Data Preparation, has been misleading for users often thinking it has to do with only data labelling, cleaning, or wrangling. In our vision, while VDP should involve data preparation in its MLOps practice, it should not be conceptually confined to only data preparation. VDP does more than that and is focused on the overall effectiveness of the unstructured data ETL with a data-centric paradigm. In spite of the high complexity of the underneath data processing, the end form of a VDP infrastructure is nothing but a data pipeline. The term Data Pipeline is more precise to capture the core concept of VDP, hence renamed as "Versatile Data Pipeline".

New AI task: Instance Segmentation

VDP now supports the instance segmentation task! It is a Vision task to detect and delineate multiple objects of pre-defined categories in an input image.

To build an instance segmentation data pipeline, check out the Streamlit example and import the Mask R-CNN model from the GitHub repo instill-ai/model-instance-segmentation-dvc.

👉 Learn more

🍎 Community Highlights

Documentation in dark mode

Everyone agrees that the first priority of all features should be supporting dark mode for the documentation! Here we go! Click the top-right toggle to turn on/off the dark mode 🌚.

🚀 Join our discord community
As 2023 approaches, we can't wait to enter the new year with you and continue building the foundation of unstructured data ETL.

Happy New Year 🎉,
Xiaofei
Co-founder & COO @ Instill AI
Sep 26 2022
Hey ,

We have many cooool VDP updates for September!

🚀 Product Updates

Introducing VDP: open-source visual data ETL

With many MLOps tools emerging in the last few years, we wrote a blog article to explain why VDP is the future for unstructured data ETL and how VDP differentiates from other MLOps tooling.
"Our mission is to make VDP the single point of visual data integration, so users can sync visual data from anywhere into centralised warehouses or applications and focus on gaining insights across all data sources, just like how the modern data stack handles structured data."
"Unlike many MLOps tooling, VDP is built from a data-driven perspective. Although the Vision AI model is the most critical component in a visual data ETL pipeline, the ultimate goal of VDP is to streamline the end-to-end visual data flow, with the transform component being able to flexibly import Vision AI models from different sources. Please see the detailed FAQ page."
👉 Continue reading
⭐️ Star VDP on GitHub
New CV Task: Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Besides image classification, object detection and keypoint detection, VDP now supports the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) task!

It is a computer vision task to detect bounding boxes containing text and to process typed or handwritten text within each bounding box into machine readable text. To build an OCR data pipeline, try to import the model from the GitHub repository instill-ai/model-ocr-dvc.

👉 Learn more

🍎 Community for Vision AI Enthusiasts

VDP supports data pipelines for diverse scenarios.

SYNC mode for real-time tasks: process your data with HTTP or gRPC APIs to get results immediately, suitable for tasks that have low-latency requirements.
🕓 ASYNC mode for on-demand workload: set up your data pipeline to process data on demand, so it processes data only when the trigger criteria are met.

Want to learn more? Read our tutorials to use VDP for your projects.

⚡ Build a shareable object detection application with VDP and Streamlit

When YOLOv7 was out, we built a web app to compare YOLOv4 and YOLOv7 side-by-side and deployed it online to share with the community.
In this tutorial, we demonstrated how to replicate this demo app. It shows that VDP and Streamlit are a perfect match if you work with ML/Data and would like to build Computer Vision prototypes fast to share with your team, clients or the world.

👉 Continue reading

🕓 Build a Cow Counter Dashboard with VDP, Postgres and Metabase

Drone-based smart agriculture solutions have become increasingly popular due to numerous benefits, including deeper insights into farming assets and data-driven decision-making process for better efficiency and reduced operational cost.

These solutions usually include the following processes on a high level:
  • 🕹Deploy drones and sensors to collect livestock data
  • ⚗️ Use AI technology to process and analyse the data for locating, counting or monitoring cattle
  • 📊 Provide easy-to-understand insights and takeaways to enable ranchers to make data-driven decisions or take immediate actions when issues arise
To showcase the above processes, read on or watch our video to see how to build an object detection ETL pipeline using VDP to analyse a drone video of a cattle farm, and create a Cow Counter dashboard with Metabase that provides insights about cattle in the video footage.

👉 Continue reading

Want to showcase what you've built with VDP? Join and share with the community!
 
🚀 Join our discord community
Stay tuned!

Cheers 🍻,
Xiaofei
Co-founder & COO @ Instill AI
Aug 13 2022
Hey ,

We've been working hard on the open-source visual data ETL tool VDP for the last few months. A lot of gooooodies 🍬 🍰 🧁 to share with our community!

🚀 Product Updates

VDP: the future for unstructured data ETL

A few months ago, we announced that we're building VDP, an open-source data tool to streamline the end-to-end visual data processing pipeline:

  • Extract unstructured visual data from pre-built data sources such as cloud/on-prem storage, or IoT devices
  • Transform it into analysable structured data by Vision AI models
  • Load the transformed data into warehouses, applications, or other destinations
We believe VDP is the future for unstructured data ETL, where developers won't need to build their own data connectors, high-maintenance model serving platform or ELT pipeline automation tool.
Pre-built ETL data connectors

VDP integrates with Airbyte to provide open-source data connectors.

By leveraging the pre-built and ready-to-use data connectors, VDP is the single point of visual data integration. You can sync visual data from anywhere into a centralised warehouse and focus on gaining insights across all your data sources, instead of maintaining pipelines.

👉 Learn more

Import models made easy

VDP integrates with the best ML tools to make importing models super easy.

No need to change how you manage your models. No matter the model is on your computer, in a GitHub or Hugging Face repository, or in cloud storage managed by version control tools like ArtiVC or DVC, import & deploy it with one click 🖱️.

👉 Learn more

Data pipelines for diverse scenarios

VDP supports data pipelines for diverse scenarios - no need to build from scratch

SYNC mode for real-time tasks: process your data with HTTP or gRPC APIs to get results immediately, suitable for tasks that have low-latency requirements.
🕓 ASYNC mode for on-demand workload: set up your data pipeline to process data on demand or schedule, so it processes data only when the trigger criteria are met.
 

👉 Learn more

Standardise Computer Vision tasks

VDP solves popular vision tasks out of the box:

  • Image classification
  • Object detection
  • Keypoint detection
  • OCR (coming soon!)
  • The list is growing…🌱

For each task, you can import corresponding STOA models into VDP to use in the data pipelines. The prediction results are automatically converted to a standardised format ready for future analysis.

👉 Learn more

Brand new Console

The Console provides a unified, clean and intuitive user experience of VDP without writing any code.


Build end-to-end data pipelines 10x faster
With VDP, you can build an end-to-end pipeline to connect your visual data, convert them to structured insights and send the results to your database in less than 5 minutes. Click here to get started.

To learn more, please check the VDP documentation.

Give VDP a ⭐ for future updates and 👉 join our community.

Instill Cloud - fully managed VDP (coming soon!)

☁️ We offer fully managed VDP service on Instill Cloud (coming soon!) with Team and Enterprise tiers to organisations that want to get all the power of VDP for their teams, without any hassle.
  • Painless setup
  • Maintenance-free infrastructure
  • Production-ready services
  • Start for free, pay as you grow 🌱
Access to Instill Cloud is currently by invitation only. If you're interested in the hosting service of VDP, join the waitlist and we'll contact you when we're ready.
Our mission is to make Vision AI accessible to everyone. If you are from academic groups and have any showcase of Vision AI in your research, please fill out the form to tell us about yourself and your project, and we will be in touch 👐.

🍎 Community for Vision AI Enthusiasts

YOLOv4 vs. YOLOv7 demo powered by VDP

We've built this live demo to play around with VDP and the STOA object detectors. You can compare the performance of YOLOv4 and YOLOv7 side-by-side.
Interested in what’s behind the curtains? VDP provides a model inference server out of the box to serve as the foundation for building real-world vision applications.

For the demo, we built two VDP pipelines with YOLOv4 and YOLOv7 respectively. By triggering them with low-code, the inference results are sent and displayed on the demo.

#HowToGrow series for Data/AI practitioners

In the last few years, we observed the converging of Data and AI. New practices, new toolings, and even new roles with shifting responsibilities are emerging.

As Vision AI practitioners, we are optimistic and excited, but we also see the whole ecosystem in a frenzied state. How do we understand each other, find the common ground to collaborate, and move forward together in this big messy fun world?

That's why we started the #HowToGrow series where experienced practitioners share valuable lessons from their Data and AI journey 👐.
💡 How to grow as an AI Researcher?
By Xiaofei Du, Co-founder & COO @ Instill AI
In 7 years of working as an AI researcher (4-year PhD + 3 years at AI/CV startup) and 2 years of do-a-bit-of-everything (AI eng, backend, frontend, PM, etc.), here are three lessons I've learnt along the way:

❶ Learn more about data pipeline to have better control of your data
❷ Explain your work on a common ground
❸ Prove the value of your work: avoid optimal on paper, broken in reality

👉 Continue reading
💡 How to grow as an AI Engineer?
by Nguyễn Văn Tâm, AI Engineer @ Instill AI
After 7 years of working as a software engineer (firmware/middleware, mobile and backend application), I switched to AI engineer role 4 years ago. Here are my takeaways from a +10-year software industry journey:

❶ Polish your MLOps tooling skill
❷ Monitor production domain drift and iterate fast
❸ Collaborate across different roles

👉 Continue reading

We'd love to hear more about your story. What's your most valuable lesson? What frustrates you most in your daily work? Share your story on Twitter and tag us @instill_tech 🐝!
Stay tuned and stay well!

Cheers 🍻,
Xiaofei
Co-founder & COO @ Instill AI
Apr 04 2022
Hey ,

Buckle up, we have many exciting updates for March!

🍎 Community for Vision AI Enthusiasts

2022 Data + Vision AI Survey

How is the converging of Data and Vision AI shaping your career and daily work? Let's figure it out together to better understand how stakeholders participate and collaborate with each other in the current Data + Vision AI era.

👉 Check out the open survey. Your input will be greatly appreciated. We will share the survey result publicly with the community.

2022 Galaxy Summit

Our CEO Ping-Lin joined a panel in this year's Galaxy Summit with Taboola's Vice President Ning Ning Wu, Gojek's Vice President Pulkit Khanna, Canner Data's CEO Howard Chi and Eslite's Vice President Frank Zhang to talk about the challenges of unstructured data processing and Vision AI in the modern data stack.

Instill AI is dedicated to making unstructured visual data analysable because only analysable data can create value. We build the open-source VDP to streamline the end-to-end visual data processing across different stakeholders.

📺 Watch the panel stream here.

🚀 Product Updates

Open-source VDP - Standardise post-processing more easily

To get the model inference output in a standardised format, check our guidelines to create a model that inherits the corresponding post-processing task class instead of creating it from scratch.
Standardise post-processing for the classification task
Standardise post-processing for the detection task
If you like VDP, don’t hesitate to give us a ⭐ on GitHub and 👉 join our community for Vision AI Enthusiasts.


Instill Cloud tutorial - How to create a detection pipeline in minutes

The tutorial shows how to use Instill AI Cloud service to create an object detection pipeline with a ready-to-use Vision AI model to process image data via HTTP requests.
Stay well!

Cheers 🍻,
Xiaofei
Co-founder & COO @ Instill AI
Mar 05 2022
Hey ,

What a busy month. Who's ready for the monthly update of February!

🚀 Product Updates

Open-source visual data Preparation (VDP)


We are so excited to announce the VDP project. It is an open-source tool to streamline the end-to-end visual data processing pipeline. In a nutshell, VDP can:
  • Ingest unstructured visual data from data sources such as data lakes or IoT devices;
  • Transform visual data to meaningful structured data representations by Vision AI models;
  • Load the structured data into warehouses, applications, or other destinations.
To build an open platform, we encourage all sorts of integrations and collaborations, and would like to learn your feedback and exchange ideas! If you like the project, don’t hesitate to give us a ⭐ on GitHub and 👉 join our community for Vision AI Enthusiasts.


Instill Cloud - with human-readable pipeline name

Instead of using a randomly generated ID, create a pipeline with a human-readable name as the unique identifier.

📖 Monthly Digest

Check our official blog, where we publish useful guides and resources on visual data preparation, Vision AI and more!

Unstructured data tool to break the tech and team silos
To date, there isn’t any simple tool that can make one easily tap on the value of unstructured visual data. Read our article Missing piece in the modern data stack: visual data preparation on how visual data preparation streamlines visual data processing and eliminates the silos across different roles with a standardised framework.

That's all for now. Stay well!

Cheers 🍻,
Xiaofei
Co-founder & COO @ Instill AI
Jan 29 2022
Hey ,

Happy 2022 🎉! It's a great way to start the new year with our product updates and interesting reads. Let's dive into the monthly update of January!

🍎 Community for Vision AI Enthusiasts

This is our biggest news! We are building a community where AI engineers, AI researchers, data engineers and data scientists share ideas of Vision AI, visual data preparation and MLOps:

  • 💡 Share articles, papers, useful tutorials and learn best practices about how to apply Vision AI to solve real-world problems
  • 🦄 Find like-minded friends and partnerships for your projects
  • 😊 Help out each other with your domain expertise and use cases
  • ... and more!

🚀 Product Updates

Instill Cloud - with a brand new console

With Instill Cloud, you don't have to worry about managing AI infrastructure, scalability or latency. We provide
  • 🧰 CLI / SDKs tools for developers to integrate with existing data stack in minutes
  • ✨ A console for non-developers to start processing visual data without coding
  • 😊 Premium support from Instill AI team
Instill Cloud is currently in private alpha, working closely with early users to build the most effective tools for visual data preparation. If this sounds interesting to you, request early access here.
 


Instill CLI - operate in the terminal

Our official command line interface (Instill CLI) is an open-source tool that provides direct access to the APIs of Instill services. You can develop shell scripts to manage your resources. See on GitHub.
 


Better performance - support for both REST and gRPC

Besides RESTful API, we now support gRPC. With smaller message payloads and rigorous specifications, the gRPC API is built to achieve low latency and high throughput communication.

📖 Monthly Digest

We have launched our official blog, where we publish useful guides and resources on visual data preparation, Vision AI and more! Check it out here.

Standardise visual data preparation
Wonder what is missing from the modern data stack? Wondering why Vision AI is still so inaccessible? Read our article Why Instill AI exists on how we bring Vision AI into the modern data stack by standardising visual data preparation.

And that's all for now. Stay well! I look forward to everything we will achieve together in 2022.

Cheers 🍻,
Xiaofei
Co-founder & COO @ Instill AI