Flower Labs Introduces Innovative AI Service for Seamless Local to Cloud Transition

Flower Labs unveils a preview of its distributed cloud platform, Flower Intelligence, enabling AI apps to switch from local to cloud processing automatically, with Mozilla among its early adopters.

Flower Labs, the Y Combinator-backed startup, just dropped a preview of their distributed cloud platform, Flower Intelligence. And guess what? Mozilla’s already tapping into it to jazz up the Thunderbird email client with their new Assist summarization add-on. Talk about hitting the ground running!

Here’s the kicker: Flower Intelligence isn’t just another cloud platform. It’s a game-changer for on-device AI apps, whether you’re on your phone, laptop, or browsing the web. The magic happens when these apps can flip to a private cloud (with your thumbs-up, of course). Start local for speed and privacy, then switch to Flower’s cloud when you need that extra oomph. Smart, right?

Sure, the big players like Microsoft and Apple are doing the hybrid dance too. But Flower Labs? They’re playing a different tune, building their platform entirely on open models. We’re talking Meta’s Llama, China’s DeepSeek, and Mistral. Open source for the win!

And about that cloud service—Flower Confidential Remote Compute—it’s not just a fancy name. With end-to-end encryption and some other secret sauce, your data stays under lock and key. Ryan Sipes from Mozilla Thunderbird gave a nod to how Flower lets them keep the sensitive stuff local. Because who doesn’t love a bit of privacy?

For the devs out there itching to get their hands on Flower Intelligence, early access applications are open now. Flower Labs isn’t stopping there; they’re rolling out more features soon, like model tweaking and cloud-based federated training. Plus, mark your calendars for March 26—Flower’s throwing a summit in London (and online) to spill all the beans on what’s next.

Since kicking off in 2023, Flower Labs has bagged around $23.6 million from big names like Felicis and Hugging Face’s CEO. And let’s not forget Brave, the open-source browser, jumping in as an early partner. Not too shabby for a startup, huh?